A PIL has been filed in the Delhi High Court seeking directions to get the Instagram group “Bois Locker Room” issue investigated through a Special Investigation Team or Central Bureau of Investigation and arrest the wrongdoer.
The Public Interest Litigation is filed by Mr. Dev Ashish Dubey through advocates Mr. Omprakash Parihar and Mr. Dushyant Tiwari, alleging that several screenshots were shared by social media user in relation to the group “Bois Locker Room”, revealing chat between group of school students from class 11th and 12th sharing photos of underage women, followed by lurid discussions on their bodies. The group was also allegedly used to share nude/morphed photographs of the women.
The petition states that “The expletive-laden chats show the boys discussing having physical relationship with their classmates as well as rating them on a scale of beauty vs the size of their breasts and how the latter makes up for any supposed deficiency in the former criteria”.
The Chat Group has numerous young boys as members disseminating sexually objectionable pictures and images of minor girls and young women. It has also been alleged that these groups were being used to discuss techniques of raping women and gang-raping minors.
The Information about the group came out when a young girl who was earlier the part of the group shared the screenshots from the group chat and soon when it went viral, celebrities also started sharing it. When the posts were all over the internet the girl started getting rape and gang rape threats by the members of the same chat group.
The petition also stated that soon after the screenshots went viral, “many of the users of the group allegedly deactivated theirsocial media profiles and also allegedly threatened to leak nude photos and hack accounts of the women who had outed them. One of the post states that “Let’s post nude photos of all girls who posted stories about us. I have photos of some of them. Now they will know the result of these shenanigans. They will shut their mouth. They want to be feminists na… they will not be able to show their face in public”.
The petitioner has sought direction to investigate the issue through SIT or CBI, arrest all the Instagram Group “Bios Locker Room” members immediately, provide safety to the girls and women who exposed the group and any other direction court deems fit.
The matter likely to be heard on May 13.
-India Legal Bureau