A City Court on Friday sentenced an accused to a collective 12 years in prison after he was found guilty of online harassment and child pornography.
According to the prosecution, Muhammad Imran made obscene videos of a 15-year-old girl and put them on the internet after she refused to marry him in June 2020. District East judicial magistrate Mukesh Kumar also imposed a fine of Rs180, 000 on the convict and ordered him to pay a compensation of Rs1 million to the victim.
Pronouncing the verdict, the judge observed that the case was a classic example of “facile masculinity”, and “patriarchal and misogynistic” thoughts prevailing in the society as a man could not accept ‘no’ to his proposal.
The magistrate added that the convict had hurt the dignity of the girl and her family by producing indecent videos without her consent and showing them to the public. The victim had testified in the court that the accused was living abroad when he befriended her and coaxed her into making indecent videos.
She added that he made the videos viral after she refused his marriage proposal. The judge said that the motive of the accused clearly surfaced on record that he was annoyed over the rejection and displayed the illicit videos to take revenge from the girl and her family.
He deplored that in society, there was often no respect for the right of women to decide whom they wanted to marry. “A consent to talk or share some personal space with a male person, without going into its legitimacy, does not mean at all that that personal space be violated and publicly shared without her consent. Because ‘NO’ always remains ‘NO’ and no one can make a woman feel inferior without her consent,” the magistrate noted.
The judge remarked that the government should take serious steps to tackle such problems by communicating the mode of redress of these issues to the public so that they could come forward against the perpetrators.
Source: The News
