Rape has often been used as titillation in our films especially through the early 80s and 90s. Being the victim of a sexual assault by the villain was almost like a rite of passage for every on-screen hero’s sister, thereby giving him a reason to seek badla. Mainstream films today treat such scenes much more sensitively and aesthetically but what is disturbing is that YouTube has become a store house of all the yesteryear scenes of sexual violence and assault from films.

(In this story we are only giving screen grabs of these videos and not embedding the video clips)

For example this scene uploaded on the site from the film Bhrashtachar (1989) is captioned as ‘Shilpa Shirodkar crying for help’.

The fact that a woman’s misery is being used to derive clicks and that viewers actually derive pleasure out of the glamourised scene of sexual assault is creepy.

What’s more shocking are the comments that follow:

While on the one hand we have a nationwide outrage over incidents of rape and our authorities bend over backwards to get All India Bakchod to apologize for the ‘vulgarity’ of their Roast, on the other hand we have tons of such rape videos on YouTube that are available for public viewing. Most of these videos are accessible to kids because there is no age verification check for them.

Another example is this clip of a girl being gang raped in front of her father, which is captioned as the ‘Funniest rape scene ever!’.

Also the comments actually find this gruesome act hilarious:

Most of these videos are bizarrely described as ‘hot’:

These clips are obviously immensely popular going by the number of views that these videos generate. But question is aren’t we being hypocritical by allowing clips like these to have a free run on YouTube while crying out loud for a ban for other things which are much less offending?