The Hindu Business Line : Making cyberspace safer for children

There is mounting evidence that trafficking in children will remain unabated the world over unless stern and imaginative measures are conceived by criminal justice policy makers and these are enforced strictly by police agencies. The recent Noida killings and the Chennai murder of a young boy by his own friends can be ignored by us only at our peril.

Children are undoubtedly vulnerable to physical attack, and this is an age-old problem. Even more distressing is the modern phenomenon of children themselves being lured into crime. The Chennai incident (where one theory that is floating around is that the deceased was subjected to a sexual attack) is, in particular, a grim warning against any complacence, because the city was, till the other day, known as a low-crime conservative metropolis.

The need of the hour, therefore, is an integrated approach that will address itself to tackling both victimisation of children and their taking to crime. Such strategy cannot ignore the fact that the most powerful medium of communication of our times, viz., the Internet, is being blatantly misused for the exploitation of children.

Online pornography, which displays vulgar images of children, is a growing industry that preys on the sick mind. We, in India, will understand this only when per capita computer penetration becomes much higher.

Guarding the Internet from being used to harm children is a delicate task that needs firmness as well as sensitivity to keeping the Internet free from too many restrictions that will defeat the very purpose of its genesis. Any innovation on this front, however small it may be, will need publicity so that replication in different geographies is facilitated.

Bold UK experiment

I am particularly impressed by what the UK has done to strike at online crimes against children. It is a bold experiment called the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre launched as recently as April 2006.

It seeks to tackle two forms of child sex abuse, viz., chat-room grooming and distribution of illegal images. Individuals indulging in these activities do them either for personal pleasure or for making money. Both are equally despicable in that they vitiate cyber space and make surfing by the young ones a perilous activity.

The CEOP is affiliated to the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), the UK equivalent of the FBI and our CBI. It derives its authority from the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. The Centre's focus is on building an international platform because this type of crime has ramifications and collusion that transcend geographic borders.

CEOP is rightly a participant in the Virtual Global Task Force (VGT) that fights sexual exploitation of children. (Other members are the Australian and Canadian Police.) Understanding the power of intelligence collection, CEOP works with both parents and children and collects their online experience so that its lessons are available to potential victims. It puts out safety messages from time to time that act as a preventive mechanism.

What is amazing is the response to the `Most Wanted' Web site that the Centre set up recently in order to chase child sex offenders evading arrest. Within weeks, this led to the arrest of three important offenders. One of them was nabbed in northern France. Only two more of the five in the list are yet to be apprehended.

CAIC crackdown

Another agency in the UK that addresses itself to the same problem is the London Child Abuse Investigation Command (CAIC), which is part of the Metropolitan Police. It has dedicated online investigators who pass on valuable data to the 425-strong team that generally works on paedophilia. The CAIC has arrested several offenders and suspects during 2006, and believes chat rooms and social networking Web sites provide an unbelievable opportunity for paedophiles to win the confidence of their targets.

Security features built into such sites are fragile and they hardly deter the determined paedophile. Sometimes it takes just two hours for a `resourceful' offender in the field to make objectionable propositions to children.

According to a Detective Superintendent of London, nearly one-third in the age-group of 9 to 19 have the experience of a sexual communication online. Very few parents were aware of this. This is a definite recipe for disaster.

One survey quoted by Reuters recently revealed that sting operations by the CAIC have been extremely productive in nabbing daring online criminals on the prowl.

NGO initiative

Most significant is the work done by some NGOs to check the menace. One of them is Save the Children (STC) set up in the UK as early as 1919. With presence in about 100 countries, it has remained focussed during the past decade on making the Internet safer for children. It supports the European Union's Safer Internet Plus programme that constantly evaluates the situation, consults all players and produces recommendations for international acceptance.

Worrisome figures

The problem exists in India in all its dimensions. I have a suspicion that it has been swept under the carpet because of other forms of crime that policy makers and law enforcement officials consider as more pressing.

I am also distressed that there are cynics who consider all this talk of paedophilia on the Net as highly exaggerated. To them I would like to quote the findings of a 2005 study by the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the US. About 40 per cent of those arrested for possession of child pornography material had actually sexually victimised children.

Of those arrested in the US in 2000-01 for such possession, 81 per cent had images of children in the age-group of 6 and 12. More than 20,000 images of child pornography are posted on the Net every week.

All these cannot be imaginary figures just to hoodwink all of us worried about the misuse of the medium. They portray the gravity of a situation that is exacerbated by revolutionary advances in reproduction processes. Production of high quality lurid pictures to be posted on the Net is now both easy and inexpensive.

I have not heard of a concerted effort that aims at demolishing the syndicates that must be working overtime in different parts of our country. What we need is not just technology but a greater will from the community of parents and NGOs to bring enough pressure on government, especially law enforcement agencies, to evolve an anti-online pornography strategy and implement it wholeheartedly.

(The writer is a former CBI Director who is currently Adviser (Security) to TCS Ltd.)

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