People want to see the Kolkata gangrape video. And this is becoming a trend

Kolkata,UPDATED: Jul 4, 2025 19:43 IST

The gang rape of a 24-year-old law student inside the South Kolkata Law College campus has led to a surge in online searches for videos of the gruesome act, reportedly filmed by one of the rapists. Google Trends data indicates a sharp and rapid spike in searches for the footage, with people employing specific keywords to locate the video of the incident after it was reported.

India Today’s OSINT team analysed this trend using various keyword variations, and identified a notable surge in some of the most disturbing search phrases.

People used search terms like “sex”, “mms”, “porn”, and “rape porn” in the context of the Kolkata law student rape case. Search volumes for keywords looking for such footage spiked on June 29, three days after the incident. One of the keywords containing the phrase “Kolkata gangrape porn” was searched for more than some other popular keywords that day.

Data shows a surge in Google searches for terms like “law student rape video”, “Kolkata rape MMS”, “Kolkata rape video”, “Kolkata law student rape”, “Kolkata rape porn”, and “Kolkata gangrape porn” immediately after the incident was reported.

India Today also found that a video titled “Kolkata law student” had been uploaded to a pornographic website on June 30. However, the authenticity of the video could not be independently verified.
On Telegram, several Bengali channels selling explicit content switched their wording from “premium videos” to “rape videos” as clickbait in the wake of the recent incident.

Pattern emerges

This isn’t the only rape case in India where such a disturbing trend has emerged.

In the days following the horrific rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in 2012, Google Trends data revealed an alarming spike in searches for the term “Delhi rape porn”. While the nation was outraged over the brutality of the crime, some expressed intent on seeking it out for voyeuristic gratification.

Search for terms like “Delhi bus porn”, “Delhi bus rape video”, and “Delhi rape video” remained at their peak on Google search until March 2012.
While Google search trends reflect a mix of queries, including those for news coverage, the spike in searches specifically targeting “MMS” or pornographic content related to the incident on adult websites is particularly disturbing.

After the 2024 RG Kar rape case in Kolkata, India Today reported on a similar spike and found at least eight Telegram channels in the name of the murdered doctor, with a cumulative subscriber base of more than 70,000 users. Many of these channels carried “video” either in their title or username — a signal that they solely targeted people searching for such videos.

Perhaps the most significant surge in search patterns was observed in July 2023, when two women were stripped and paraded naked by a mob in Manipur. Offensive search terms like “Manipur naked video”, “Manipur viral video”, “Manipur rape video”, “Manipur naked parade”, and “Manipur naked girls” saw a sharp rise on Google.

Hundreds of pages on porn sites and shady content aggregators, Telegram groups, and cloud storage apps like Terabox, where pornographic content is widely hosted and distributed, shared the video. India Today has found more than a dozen telegram channels titled “Manipur viral video” and similar still exist, with some containing the horrific video.

Delhi-based mental health practitioner Dr Khushi K Gund suggests that a deep sense of sexual inadequacy, coupled with porn addiction and other underlying psychological issues, may be driving the disturbing trend of searching for rape videos online.

Gund says: “Many individuals drawn to such content are not aroused by intimacy but by control, domination, and humiliation which are often rooted in unresolved trauma, misogyny, or a need for power. Repeated exposure to mainstream porn can lead to desensitization, pushing some toward more extreme content like rape fantasies to feel aroused.”

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