Faced with public outcry over a nationwide sexual assault crisis which has seen an alarming 60 percent increase in rapes and sexual crimes over the past five years in the small south Asian country of Nepal, the government there has responded by identifying and cracking down on a convenient scapegoat—online pornography.
The public outcry over Nepal’s sex crime epidemic reached a peak over the summer with the brutal rape-murder of a 13-year-old girl in a small Nepalese town. Months later, amid allegations of a police cover-up and numerous street demonstrations demanding action, no suspect has been named or arrested in the horrific crime.
But the government did, in fact, move swiftly against online porn sites, claiming that more than 25,000 porn sites had been blocked as of Sunday, October 14, according to an Associated Press report.
“This is only the start, but a very good start,” Nepal Telecom Authority official Min Prasad Aryal told the AP. The new ban requires that internet service provider sin Nepal block porn sites, or face a fine of up to $4,200, in a country where per capita annual income is only about $1,000. ISPs also face the loss of their operating licenses if they fail to comply with the porn ban.
While blocking pornography sites by the thousands has been the Nepalese government's most visible response to the shocking rise in rapes there, it is not necessarily a popular move in the Himalayan country of about 30 million. An editorial in The Katmandhu Post last week slammed the porn ban, saying that “the government decided, as it so often has in the past, to adopt a diversionary tactic that is knee-jerk and arbitrary. ...a myopic and misguided attempt at vilifying and scapegoating sex.”
Porn itself is also a popular form of online entertainment in Nepal, as it is in many countries. “Google trends in Nepal consistently show over 70 per cent of internet users searching ‘porn’ on the Google search engine every week over the last 12 months,” the Post noted, in an earlier report.
Free speech activists in Nepal have also spoken out against the porn ban, saying that censoring porn sites opens the door to more widespread internet censorship.
“This opens up the path for the government to block any websites in the future, saying they have obscene content,” Taranath Dahal of the Nepalese media rights group Freedom Forum told the AP. “This order was issued without clarifying what is obscene and why or without doing any proper study.”
The Nepalese online news site The Record wrote that the government put the porn ban in place only because it had “failed at punishing rapists.”
“Online spaces are essential for knowledge and activism, and it is important for marginalized groups such as LGBTIQ to find their community and seek information related to their queerness,” wrote Record journalist Shubha Kayastha. “The porn ban is likely to disproportionately impact these groups.”
Photo by Sigismund von Dobschütz / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
