BLACK MIRROR

BOIS LOCKER ROOM SCANDAL

- KAUSHIK DEKA with Sonali Acharjee

IT was towards the end of March and Prashant (name changed), an arts stream student in one of Delhi’s top private schools, had just finished his Plus 2 board exams and was all set to have “some fun”. But then COVID-19 and the lockdown spoilt all his plans and confined him to his room. Worse, the ‘fun’ has gone sideways and now he fears he’ll have to spend time in a police lock-up.

Prashant was part of the now-infamous Instagram group, ‘Bois Locker Room’, which came to light on May 3 when a Delhi girl shared screenshots of the sexually explicit conversations in the group. The viral post had students of Delhi’s prominent schools boasting about their sexual escapades, sharing nude/ morphed photographs of girl students, and body-shaming them. “We shouldn’t have done what we did. It was a big mistake, but we are not criminals. There was no plan to rape anyone,” says Prashant, who will turn 18 in a few months. Delhi Police cyber cell head Anyesh Roy corroborates this. The rape conversation, he confirmed, did not take place in the Bois Locker Room; it was part of a Snapchat interaction, intriguingly between a girl and a boy. The girl, assuming the fake identity of a boy, was instigating the boy at the other end of the conversation to rape her to check his “strength of character”. The boy, thankfully, refused.