On the night of 12 December, a video circulated among the residents of Boragaon area of Guwahati in Assam. The gruesome video allegedly depicted a gang rape incident involving a group of youths and a woman. At around 2:30 AM on 13th December, information was received by the Officer in Charge of Gorchuk Police Station in Guwahati from a media person from a regional satellite channel. Based on the video, the police immediately conducted raids at various locations and apprehended 8 youths all within the age groups between 18 to 23.
These young men, as shown on the video, violated the modesty of the girl and the shocking part was they were recording the video by themselves. One of the youths in the video was seen laughing with an element of bragging to show how “grandeur” his actions were.
Whenever crime happens in Guwahati, there’s often curiosity about the community or religion of those involved (which is, frankly, a wrong mindset). But what we shouldn’t ignore is the pattern emerging among these young men.
Young men have taken up a culture which is facilitated by the disturbing content available on social media. These are videos that display toxic masculinity, sexual and graphic and also further the unrealistic sexual imagining of the youth.
In Tier 2 cities such as Guwahati, which has only seen growth to the outside world in the last decade, the youth is sandwiched between various aspirations. One is to pursue and compete with the young minds of the rest of the country and the other is to aspire to be deviants which is also promoted in the same online world.
It is not right to co-relate the gang rape incident to the usage of social media however the emerging trends among the crimes committed by the youth show extreme aggressiveness. The way to proceed is to bring about a bill that regulates social media for the Youth like in Australia and also to impart online content education among the students in schools.
