In a special drive conducted by Kerala police with the help of Interpol, cases have been registered against as many as 58 people for frequently sharing child pornography with others through various social media platforms. According to a report by Times Now, as many as 38 have been arrested so far and teams have been formed to nab others.
The crackdown is a part of operation ‘P-hunt’ (paedophile hunt) initiated by Cyberdome, a wing of the Kerala Police on June 11, 2019, wherein Kerala police, to curb the menace of cybercrime involving sexual attacks on children, joined hands with the Interpol, Crimes against Children Unit and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
The operation is being led by Additional Deputy General of Police (ADGP) Manoj Abraham under the supervision of Deputy General of Police (DGP) Loknath Behara.
The Kerala police cyber wing has recently cracked down on an international group of men who frequently distributed such content through various social media platforms.
Abraham said that when his team came across websites on the darknet they decided to launch the operation. Dark web or darknet refers to encrypted online content that is not indexed by conventional search engines.
Also Read: Kerala police join hands with Interpol to fight online sexual exploitation of children
He said that the team came across one such group which had a total of five lakh members, 126 of whom are from Kerala. Administrators of this group live in Pakistan and other European countries, added the police officer.
Though it was difficult to track members at first since they use fake identities and pseudonyms to conceal their identities, however, Kerala Police trained with Interpol and other agencies managed to crack down on the members of the group, revealed Abraham.
Raids were conducted at 21 places across the state by the Counter Child Sexual Exploitation Unit of Kerala Police. Various media reports suggested that the raids began at 6 am on October 12 and concluded around Sunday midnight.
Equipment such as laptops, mobile phones, modems, hard disks and memory cards along with computers and other electronic devices were seized. Police also identified multiple groups on WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook where pornographic content was being shared by active members.
Paedophilia, or to treat children as sex objects, is rampant all around us but the NDA Government has come down hard on Indian porn websites promoting child pornography and selling rape and gang-rape videos of Indian women and children.
Recently India signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the USA to combat online child pornography. Last year, five such were shut down by the central government on receiving tip-offs from the cyber portal of National Crime Records Bureau. Five separate FIRs have been lodged against these websites under various sections of the Information Technology Act.
In 2015, the ministry of communications and IT, the department of telecommunications and the central government had listed over 800 websites and had issued an order to restrain service providers from transmitting them as their contents were found to be pornographic in nature.