NEW DELHI: Indicating a sharp rise in demand for online child pornography during the lockdown, India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) has come out with a report to say that while in November – December, an average 5 million searches for child porn on the public web were made across 100 cities in India, now this demand may have increased by 100%.ICPF – an organisations working on child protection and trafficking makes the claim of a 100% increase drawing upon inferences from “Pornhub” data and corroborating it with indications from online data monitoring websites that reflect a spike in searches for keywords like “child porn”, “sexy child” and “teen sex videos”.ICPF cites data from Pornhub , the largest pornography website in the world, to point that traffic from India on that website has increased by 95% between March 24-26, as compared to their average traffic, pre-Coronavirus.“This increase has been fueled by Pornhub making its premium content free during the lockdown. A significant segment of this spike can be attributed to the demand for child pornography content. This is substantiated by online data monitoring websites during the same time period, which shows that search for keywords like ‘child porn’, ‘sexy child’ and ‘teen sex videos’ has also jumped, and is projected to spike further in the coming weeks,” Nivedita Ahuja, manager technology from ICPF warns citing the report.It is also shared that organisations like Europol, the United Nations and ECPAT report that COVID-19 lockdowns have led to an increase in the demand for CSAM attempts to target children online to ‘groom’ them - befriending them on social media, building an emotional connection and luring them to perform sexual activities through photos and videos.To understand the landscape of child sexual abuse material (‘CSAM’ or ‘child pornography’) in India and to deter its demand, ICPF launched a study between November-December last year. The research focused on the demand for CSAM on the public web and found that the demand for child pornography was an average of 5 million per month in 100 cities.“A vast majority of individuals were interested in generic CSAM content involving ‘school girls sex’ and the demand for content with specific age groups, sexual actions and locations was growing,” it is stated in the report.It is further stated that of the individuals who were interested in specific themes in CSAM, a significant number skewed towards violent content. “While all child pornography is violent, 18% individuals exhibited explicit intent for videos where children were choking, bleeding, tortured, in pain or screaming,” it is pointed.“The demand for this kind of content grew as much as 200% during the project duration. This indicates that Indian men are not ‘satisfied’ with generic child pornography and demand violent and exploitative content,” it is stated in the report.The user base for CSAM content in India was found to be more than 90% male and 1% female with rest nondescript, but the demand for CSAM was present across age groups.A large number of individuals were using virtual private networks (VPN) to circumvent the Government of India ban on CSAM content.