By Maya Palit
Three incidents in the last week gave us some food for thought about how videos are shot of women in enormously vulnerable situations for various agendas. A man hacked a woman to death with an axe in Ludhiana on Sunday, and shot a 27-second video of himself with her mutilated body afterwards.
Another video, which went viral, showed a semi-nude woman at a Hyderabad rehab centre called Aaram Ghar, who had been chained around her legs. The video went viral on social media. Initially there was some talk about the possibility that she was sexually assaulted, but so far the police probe has refuted that. Has the video helped to catalyse a response from the police? It seems like it, but it’s tough to say because they are apparently still trying to verify whether it was ‘authentic’.
And perhaps the most disturbing one was a case where 14 men molested two women in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, and shot a 3-minute video depicting it. While this video going viral didn’t for one second provoke a thoughtful response from the MLA Azam Khan, who suggested that women don’t go to places where there is a ‘brazen dance of shamelessness’, it apparently did help the police identify the location.
After the Bangalore molestation, we thought about the power dynamics and usefulness of sharing videos of sexual assault in particular. The spectrum of responses at the time, from those wanting to skin or parade the molestors in public to others denying that molestation is a serious issue, were pretty alarming.
But the questions still remain relevant, particularly as all these videos uploaded in this last week make it clear that the issue extends far beyond assault. It’s clear that as the proliferation of videos uploaded on social media is only increasing, and women are planning to live stream their birthing sessions to show you that it’s not like it looks in the movies, footage of women is also being put up without their consent, whether they’re dead and hacked, seemingly mentally unstable, or being molested.