Demand for child porn surged during lockdown

Bengaluru: The Indian Child Protection Fund (ICPF) on Monday said the demand for child pornographic material (also referred to as Child Sexual Abuse Material) has been rising during the lockdown period.

The ICPF reported that since the lockdown, online data monitoring websites are showing an increase in demand for various keyword searches.

Data from Pornhub, the world's largest pornography website in the world, also reveals that traffic from India has increased by 95 per cent between March 24 and March 26, as compared to their average traffic, pre-Coronavirus outbreak, ICPF said in a statement.

ICPF has warned that this indicates that millions of paedophiles, child rapists and child pornography addicts have migrated online, making the internet extremely unsafe for children, and said without stringent action, this could result in a drastic rise in sexual crimes against children.

ICPF has released a report titled 'Child Sexual Abuse Material in India', a research of child pornography demand in 100 cities in India like New Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Kochi, and Indore.

The overall demand for child pornography was an average of five million per month in 100 cities on the public web during December 2019, which has now spiked, the statement said.

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