Delhi schoolboy held over shocking chatroom that talked about girls’ rape

Mangalore Today News Network / NDTV

New Delhi, May 05, 2020:   A Delhi schoolboy has been taken into custody and more have been identified as the police investigate a students’ Instagram group chat that talked about rape of schoolgirls. The group called "Bois Locker Room", which has caused huge outrage since it was exposed on Sunday, is deactivated now.

 

The teen, from a well-known Delhi school, has identified 20 more boys who were active on the group. His mobile phone has been seized by the Cyber Cell of Delhi Police and is being investigated.

Class 11 and 12 students of four or five schools in south Delhi are believed to be involved in the outrageous forum that is every parent’s nightmare; the schoolboys casually talked about rape, sexual objectification and slut-shamed schoolgirls on the group chatroom.

The cyber-crime division of the police has written to Facebook-owned Instagram for details on the group.

The controversy surfaced on Sunday after several social media users posted screenshots on Instagram and Twitter of "Bois Locker Room". Soon, the shockingly lurid content went viral.

The screengrabs were of students from some of Delhi’s top schools posting photos of teenage girls without their consent along with comments too crude to be reproduced.

A number of conversations revolved around sexual assault often against their own classmates, in a frighteningly casual way, raising worries about the normalizing of rape, misogyny and objectification in schools.

The top trending hashtag #BoysLockerRoom drew thousands of posts on Twitter and other platforms.

A social media user by the username @ashnaasharma, one of the first to highlight the group, wrote on Twitter, "I have never in my life been so furious. These shameless f***** are not even slightly guilty about what they’ve done. They’re going around and hacking our accounts now. NOTHING CAN OR WILL STOP US."

According to social media accounts that posted the screenshots, members of "Bois Locker Room" even threatened to leak nude photographs of the women who reported them and launched a second group.

Sexist attitudes, rape jokes and so called "locker room banter" are considered by experts the foundations that escalate from normalisation of rape culture to outright sexual assault.