(Banned) porn more popular than news

There is no credible literature that shows controlling the dissemination of porn reduces violence against women. Yet last October Nepal banned access to all porn sites following the horrendous rape-and-murder of Nirmala Panta, a 13-year-old Kanchanpur native. 

Many believe the government resorted to this populist tactic after failing to properly investigate the case and bring the culprits to justice. The ban is still in place and, every day, the number of banned sites is increasing. But, then, is the traffic to porn sites from Nepal decreasing? Or are the acts of violence against women, for that matter? 

When we contacted xHamster, a popular porn site, it sent us a graph that clearly shows that the number of Nepali visitors to the site has been steadily increasing (see graph in page 6). According to similarweb.com, a global website ranking platform, Nepalis visit popular porn websites more often than they visit the news portals of any of the country’s major media groups. 

Says Avash Mulmi, a network and system specialist at Jyaasa Technologies Pvt Ltd, it is nigh impossible to impose a blanket ban on porn. People invariably find a way to circumvent the filters. “There are freely available VPN services and people can easily bypass the filters by tunneling the network traffic through other servers hosted internationally,” he says. Awantika Thapa, 28, says the ban did affect her porn-viewing a bit at the start. But then her friend introduced her to VPN services and all the blocked sites again became instantly available.

Nor does the ban seem to be serving the government aim of reducing violence against women, at least not in Kathmandu. According to the Metropolitan Police Office in Teku, 27 cases of attempted rape and 111 cases of rape were reported with it in 2016-2017. A year later, in 2017-2018, there were 44 reported cases of attempted rape and 145 cases of rape. In a year since the ban, while 40 cases of attempted rape were reported, the number of rape cases had jumped to 225. 

Perhaps the government intent is spot on. Yet data from past one year clearly show that its porn ban is not working. The big danger of this populist policyis that more and more children and youngsters could be pushed into the dark web, which has horrendous contents like child pornography and live human skinning. The ban was a risky and self-serving bet. Instead of working to improve law and order and giving better sex education, the government chose the easiest and the most impractical way out of the social problems it encountered.

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Traffic to porn sites increasing and so is sexual violence

While it is now generally harder to access sexually explicit content online, dodging the ban is not particularly difficult. Nor does the ban seem to have had the intended effect of reducing sexual offenses in a year since its implementation. 

Data show that the number of reported cases of sexual violence in Kathmandu has not decreased following the ban.

In what was arguably a misguided attempt at curbing sexual violence against women, the government banned pornography in September last year following the rape and murder of Nirmala Panta, a 13-year old girl from Kanchanpur district. Following the ban, Prajesh SJB Rana, writing for APEX, had predicted how such a move would only lead more people into the dark web, a dangerous part of the internet where you can, among other things, view child pornography and hire hitmen. When queried, government censors and Nepal Police had little or no idea about the dark web. The APEX article also questioned the ban’s efficacy.

Around 25,000 pornographic sites had been blocked immediately after the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology instructed the Internet Service Providers of Nepal to do so last September-end. According to Rishi Ram Tiwari, joint secretary and spokesperson of the ministry, if a website is categorized as pornographic, it automatically gets blocked in Nepal. This means the number of pornographic sites banned in Nepal is constantly increasing. Tiwari adds that the government’s move has been effective as Nepalis can no longer access pornographic content easily.

One of those still trying to access porn is Arpita Shakya, 26, who says the ban has reduced the diversity of porn that she used to sample. “Now I only watch a few sites that are not banned on incognito mode. I do not know how to access the blocked sites,” she adds. Her testimony suggests the government has not been able to ban all porn sites, which is not surprising.

Says Avash Mulmi, a network and system specialist at Jyaasa Technologies Pvt Ltd, the plethora of porn sites, with new ones sprouting up every day, makes it nigh impossible to impose a blanket ban. People invariably find a way to circumvent the filters. “There are freely available VPN services and people can easily bypass the filters by tunneling the network traffic through other servers hosted internationally,” he says. Besides, adds Mulmi, various browsers come with inbuilt VPN services for anonymizing the network traffics, which can also be used to outsmart the filters.

Bishal Shrestha, director of the Central Cyber Bureau of Nepal Police in Bhotahiti, acknowledges that although pornographic sites are not as easily accessible in Nepal as before, it is still difficult to control access as people can still view such sites using VPN and proxy servers. “Even if a website has pornographic content and we block it, it may change its name or category, making it again accessible to Nepalis”, says Shrestha.

Up, down, up

Indeed. Traffic from Nepal to porn websites also show that Nepalis are finding a way to circumvent the filters. APEX contacted two popular porn websites, pornhub and xHamster, inquiring about traffic data from Nepal to their websites, before and after the ban. There was no response from pornhub. But xHamster, ranked by similarweb.com as the 42nd most visited website from Nepal, did send us a data-chart (see above).

Data from xHamster shows that when the ban was first imposed traffic from Nepal dropped. By the next month, however, the traffic had risen above average and has since been steadily increasing. Also, according to similarweb.com, which monitors global website traffic, pornhub and pornhdvideos are among the 10 most visited websites from Nepal this year. Each of these porn websites has more traffic from Nepal than do either Twitter or Wikipedia.

Biddhut Shrestha, 23, says that the porn ban did not affect him much. “Most social media and porn sites were also blocked in my college’s network, but we managed to see them nonetheless. They also blocked VPN, but I then used Psiphon [a free internet censorship circumnavigation tool] to access all the blocked sites,” he reveals.
Awantika Thapa, 28, also says that when the ban was imposed, it did affect her a bit initially. But then her friend introduced her to VPN services and all the blocked sites again became instantly available.

The missing link

The main reason the government banned these sites was to control sexual violence. But even here, data show that the number of reported cases of sexual violence in Kathmandu has not decreased following the ban. For instance, according to the Metropolitan Police Office in Teku, 27 cases of attempted rape and 111 cases of rape were reported with it in 2016-2017. A year later, in 2017-2018, 44 cases of attempted rape and 145 cases of rape were reported. Data from 2018-2019—after the ban was imposed—show a further increase in the number of reported rape cases. In that year, while 40 cases of attempted rape were reported, the number of reported rape cases had jumped to 225.

It is telling that there has also been no definitive study, anywhere in the world, that watching porn leads to sexual violence. But the undeterred Deputy Superintendent of Police Krishna Kumar Chand of the Metropolitan Police Range in Teku has another theory. He says although data show an increase in sexual harassment cases, it might be because people are now more willing to report them (and not necessarily because the actual number of such cases has gone up). In defense of the ban, Chand says almost everyone has a mobile phone these days, even children. “If not for the ban, they would access pornographic content easily. The ban does control their access to porn,” he argues.

Seconding him, Shahakul Bahadur Thapa, Senior Superintendent of the Metropolitan Crime Division, also in Teku, says that in a developing country like Nepal, watching pornography has more negative than positive effects. He avers that watching porn is not bad per se, but one should be able to tell if certain things in the pornography is wrong so that they do not commit such acts in real life. “Not everyone is self-aware and able to differentiate right from wrong,” says SSP Thapa. But even he acknowledges that banning porn sites alone won’t stop sexual violence.

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(The names of some respondents have been changed to protect their privacy)