India Has Blocked Access To 827 Online Porn Sites, Reports Say

India, the world’s second-most populous country with more than 1.3 billion people or approximately 18 percent of the total human population, is now out of reach for online porn sites, according to reports coming out of the region. According to a report by The Deccan Herald newspaper, the massive Indian internet service provider Jio has now blocked an unknown number of porn sites, after a court in India’s state of Uttarakhand issued an order in September for the government to ban access to online porn. The court order came in response to an incident in which four high school boys gang raped a girl at their school, telling police that they had viewed online porn prior to committing the rape.  “Unlimited access to these pornographic sites is required to be blocked/curbed to avoid an adverse influence on the impressionable minds of children,” the court said in its order, according to a Herald report.  The video aggregation sites Pornhub and XVideos were blocked by Jio, along with hundreds of others, according to a report by The Financial Express. According to The Express, the Uttarakhand court order named 857 separate sites, but India’s Ministry of Electronics determined that 30 of the sites on the list were not porn at all. As a result the order bans 827 sites. The order applies to all ISPs in the country, but reports so far have pertained only to bans by Jio. Other internet firms, however, are expected to follow Jio’s lead, and may have done so already, according to The Express. Jio has made no public statement about the porn ban, or even acknowledged that the ban exists, according to Times Now News. But the blockages were noticed by users of the internet forum Reddit.  “I’ve been trying to load a few of the porn sites but none of them seem to load on the Jio network,” wrote one Reddit user. “Is it just me or are you people facing the same issues?” “I tried opening pornhub yesterday and ended up nutting to my imagination. What the frick guys?!” wrote another frustrated porn consumer on Reddit. Neighboring Nepal, a country of only 29 million which borders the Indian state of Uttarakhand, to India’s northeast, announced on October 14 that the government there had banned online porn, blocking about 25,000 sites, as the country’s response to a rise in rape cases there, as AVN.com reported. Despite the responses of India and Nepal to rape incidents, statistical studies have repeatedly shown no correlation between viewing porn and committing sexual crimes such as rape. In fact, as sexuality researcher Michael Castleman has noted, as the societal prevalence of porn increased with the rise of the internet throughout the 1990s. rates of sexual assault dropped sharply in the United States, declining by 44 percent from 1995 to 2009. Photo By Nairspecht/Wikimedia Commons