ByThe one-room apartment that Sarita and her family of four reside in seems to burst at its seams, with the pressure of having to accommodate almost ten years’ worth of Sarita’s achievements. Medals, for instance, overflow from every shelf. Against the flickering glow of a laptop, Sarita makes a quiet confession – she was madly in love with Vinod. “It was an amazing feeling. We would share pictures, videos. We would talk for hours,” she recalls as her mother, a homemaker, looks on.In September 2015, two days before her birthday, Vinod invited Sarita to his apartment in Panvel for a ‘pre-birthday party’ with close friends. But when no one turned up after 6pm, Sarita started to panic.She was also drowsy from the alcohol Vinod offered her; her very first drink. “Over the next two hours, he raped me repeatedly,” she says. Meanwhile, when she failed to return home at 9 o’clock — which is when she usually comes home from tuitions — her frantic parents called her friends and teachers. She eventually did turn up at 9:30 pm, pacifying her parents. “She said that she went to visit a sick friend,” says her mother.Vinod did not stop calling Sarita. “I did not respond. Then one morning, I got a text from him saying that he has a clip of the rape and he threatened to circulate it if I did not meet him again.” Petrified, she agreed to meet him after bunking class and her sexual ordeal continued. She even attempted to put an end to the nightmare by paying him Rs 6,000 — money that she got by selling the smartphone, her father’s gift — but he continued stalking her in school and elsewhere. “I finally decided to tell my parents everything,” says Sarita. Her parents lodged a complaint and Vinod was arrested in September. He has since been released on bail.n a majority of such cases, it’s the parents who lodge a complaint, say sources. Though police officials admit they have no data to establish that there has been an increase in similar crimes involving minors and video recordings, Mumbai police spokesperson DCP Dhananjay Kulkarni says that 743 cases were reported under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act in Mumbai last year. The figure in 2014 stood at 678. “It is hard to say how many of these cases involved blackmailing of victims using obscene videos and photos of the rape,” he says. A senior police official, on condition of anonymity, hazards a guess. “I think the number should be somewhere between 1-5 per cent of all the cases reported so far,” he says. This estimate of 7-37 cases, many agree, only scratches the surface of a problem more endemic.Social activist and advocate Dr Avisha Kulkarni, for instance, has dealt with similar cases in reputed schools across the city. She says that such crimes are not partial to a particular class. “It happens everywhere. In slightly better-off families, these cases mostly go unreported ... There is free access to porn where, in most cases, women are victimised and dominated, and that becomes something young boys fantasise about.” The picture that Kulkarni’s analysis paints is bleak — but it also signals the dangers of a world where unfettered access to technology conditions adolescent responses to sex and sexuality.Dr Vijay Raghavan, Professor, Centre for Criminology and Justice, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), is of the view that common public discourse often precludes the bigger picture. “The broader issue is how the topic of sex and sexuality gets handled in schools and adult society, especially by parents. Since this topic is completely taboo, many children go underground and are left exploring their sexuality with sources that may not necessarily be reliable.” The question which Dr Raghavan says we should ask is a more macro one. “Are our children growing up as gendersensitive adults or does society continue to reproduce the same sexual and gender stereotypes of men as dominant partners?” A brief exploration of the web that enables and entangles today’s minors, helps us move toward an answer that sadly does not promise hope.n August 2014, Bhagyashree* befriended 22-year-old Pavan* on Facebook. “One day, he invited me over to his friend’s house in Dahisar on the pretext that we could watch a movie together,” recalls the 16-year-old. “But as soon as we entered the apartment, he bolted the door and raped me. I tried to scream, but he stuffed my mouth with a handkerchief and filmed the act. Later, he threatened me and said he would make my life hell if I told anyone.” Pavan even blackmailed the teenager into paying him Rs 16,000, and was later arrested by the Dahisar police after her parents lodged a complaint. He too has been released on bail.Shweta Chawla, a Pune-based private investigator is also the head and chief investigator of SC Cyber Solutions. She has worked with the Pune Cyber Crime Cell and police stations across Maharashtra, helping them crack cases of cyber-crime. She says the police force regularly organises workshops where experts from the field are invited to help train police officers who deal with cyber-crimes that involve women and children.Speaking from her experience of holding workshops in schools and colleges across Pune, Chawla points out that students are hardly aware about what they should do in order to remain safe online. “Their first reaction is, ‘But this won’t happen to us’,” she informs. In some schools, much of the conversation before morning assembly revolves around the porn sites students visited the night before. “And if they don’t visit them, they are ridiculed. And these students are in Classes VIII, IX and X,” she says. “There is a lot of peer pressure.”Chawla was recently approached by the mother of a minor, who spent hours on Skype with her ‘boyfriend’. “The girl was a little shy so when a boy she liked from another class told her he liked her, but that they should keep the relationship a secret, she readily agreed.” The Skype sessions got intimate in nature and one day, her mother walked in on her daughter during one such session. “We investigated the matter privately.” And the ‘boyfriend’ turned out to be a 47-year-old stranger who had recorded all the Skype sessions. “Although the incident didn’t escalate to blackmail, there was potential for it to,” says Chawla. “Somehow,” she continues, “among children, the particular knowledge that you should never talk to strangers doesn’t extend to the digital world.”She also points out that the filming of such crimes is not new. “Before, it used to be the old-fashioned camera and till ten years ago, such videos were shared via Bluetooth in a smaller group. The reach and extent to which such videos can be disseminated has increased today. The instrument has changed, but the modus operandi remains the same.” Women’s rights activist and lawyer Flavia Agnes agrees that filming crimes is not a new phenomenon. “Even when paedophilic foreigners came down to India and abused children, they made pornographic material out of it,” she says. However, she stresses that such incidents should not overshadow the many benefits of technology, which even crime detection teams rely on to nab criminals, among others.ccording to advocate YP Singh, a former IPS officer, there is very little that the police can do in terms of coercive action when dealing with such cases that involve minors. “Most of the time, youngsters are not fully aware of the law and they need to be taught that filming objectionable content is illegal. Also, for more efficiency the police need to probe the two crimes — rape and extortion through circulating video clips — separately,” he says. “Youngsters also need to be taught that below 18 years of age, even consensual sex amounts to rape.”Fifteen-year-old Rashi Mehra* settles down on the plush sofa at her home in Sion for a quick chat before heading for tuitions. We talk about how adolescents use technology in their private lives. “Well, most of my friends have boyfriends and girlfriends and yes, sometimes, they do end up clicking selfies when they kiss.” Mehra says that her friends don’t really look at it as something that’s potentially harmful. Giddily daring, yes, but dangerous — “No, not really,” she shrugs. Why? “I don’t know,” she says, her eyes straying to her phone, lit up with the notification of new WhatsApp message. “I guess we simply don’t look at technology or social media as something to be feared or shunned. It’s also rather exciting and cool, I guess.”The principal of MET Rishikul Vidyalaya, Kavita Sanghvi points out that there is a tendency among students to experiment and take risks. “In most cases, the thrill that they get is so high that they forget about all the possible consequences. As teachers, we should develop a rapport with these students that not just allows us to tell them what not to do, but also explain why not to do it.”Richa Kaul Padte, editor of online imprint Deep Dives (which currently explores sexuality in the digital world), points out that there is a sense of panic when talking about technology and minors in the same breath. “I think we should draw a clear line between what we are worried about. Is it consensual sex between two minors? Or a sexual crime where consent is violated? Because the two are not the same and there is something wrong if we put the two in the same box,” she says. Cyber safety initiatives, she continues, often tend to project technology as dangerous when it comes to sexuality. “When such initiatives say things like ‘Don’t send that sexy text to someone’ or ‘Don’t take those kind of pictures’, they are usually directed at girls. This is a form of victim-blaming,” she says. “Teenagers use technology in the same way they always have: to connect with each other. What was once an explicit love letter is now a sext, but the motivation is the same, it’s just the medium that has changed.”n November, the gang-rape of a 15-year-old school girl by her classmate and three other friends in Malad shocked the suburb and the city. The boys, all below the age of 18, allegedly filmed the rape and then circulated it within the neighbourhood. “The girl was traumatised after the incident,” says senior police inspector of Malad police station Shashank Sandbhor. “We arrested all four youngsters and sent them to a juvenile home. We also seized their mobile phones, to ensure that the videos didn’t get circulated further.”Such minors, says a social activist who works closely with juveniles at the Dongri Children’s Home, cannot foresee the consequences of their crime. “The juvenile acts impulsively, without comprehending the gravity of the situation. But in order to prevent such crimes from recurring, we need to analyse what pushed the minor to that stage,” she says, not wanting to be named.Four years ago, Zulfiquar Memon of MZM Legal represented a school security officer in his early-30s, who was accused of raping a Class V student. Memon claims that there was no incriminating evidence against the accused but he still got convicted. “Sentiments ride high when the victim is a minor,” he explains, recalling the bad press he and his team got for taking up the case. “And even if they get acquitted, life is not easy — they become the subject of ridicule.” Like in Malad, there are other reported cases where the accused are themselves minors and this only complicates response more.Dr Asha Mukundan, Assistant Professor, Centre for Criminology and Justice, TISS, complains that with the juvenile accused in the Nirbhaya case being released, society has become all the more “closed”. “Tolerance levels have gone down and integrating these kids back into society has become a big challenge for us. Instead, we should be looking at other aspects, like what kind of facilities are available to rehabilitate these children? Most of these children are addicts so does Maharashtra have de-addiction centres for children? Unfortunately, we don’t,” she says. All this only highlights the truth that ours is no country for young men or tomorrow’s women.