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K. Ramesh Babu

Spare no effort.

R.K.Raghavan

Every instance of child pornography, wherever it comes from, reinforces my uneasy feeling that it is one crime that is under-reported in many countries such as India, and consequently its significance to mankind has not been fully appreciated. One reason for the under-estimation of the evil is that many of us who strongly believe in the goodness of mankind can hardly visualise that an adult can be so perverted as to be gratified by sexually explicit images of a child.

It is not as if child sexual abuse is of recent origin. This evil in its original form, different from what we know it in the present context, has been in existence for centuries, and only the power of modern investigative journalism and the dedication of some NGOs have succeeded in unearthing its various facets.

If the arrival of printing had fuelled it by facilitating distribution of crude child images, it is the creation of the Internet that has eliminated the geographic limits to such distribution. This is a sad development and an unimagined distortion of a medium that was initially looked upon only as the fountain of knowledge.

Unchecked, I believe, this misuse of the Internet for sexual gratification of adults is going to place all our children at great peril.

I am impressed with the work turned out in the area by some European enforcement agencies.

The astounding results produced by them are the reward for what may be rightly regarded as an obsession to root out the evil. Nothing short of an obsession would work. The Interpol has also played a significant role in identifying the international links of groups engaged in the production and sale of child images.

More than that, it has also been promoting knowledge on how to act upon receiving information of the commission of the offence, as also to seek international cooperation.

The latest report received from Spain strongly illustrates the nature of the problem that confronts us and what the police and the citizenry can do. In a swoop widely reported by international media, the Spanish Police arrested more than 200 persons for handling and transmitting or possessing objectionable Internet images of children.

Credit cards had been used by some to buy pictures from many places, including the US and Belarus, two countries separated not only by geography but by ideology as well.

The vastness of the distribution network can be gauged from the fact that 18,000 IP addresses worldwide were unearthed by the Spanish Police in the process, 1,600 of these were from Spain alone.

Those arrested came from a cross-section of society. They included bankers, a priest, porters and airline pilots. A large number of hard drives, video cassettes, and laptops were seized. Interestingly, a few of those who had been arrested for making the pictures had used their own children as subjects.

Can anything be more shocking than this? The positive feature of the operation was that it was the joint endeavour of many police agencies in various parts of the world, with valuable inputs from the Interpol.

Authorities in the UK have led the world in creating awareness of the problem, lending focused attention to the task of controlling online pornography, thereby enhancing the safety of children accessing the Net. A separate police squad called the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) with headquarters in London has been active in the area. As part of the UK Police, it welcomes information about child abuse through the Internet and has a helpline that has proved its worth. It plays a substantial role in educating parents and children alike on how to guard themselves. It is aided in this exercise by collection of intelligence on trends on the Net.

In its latest report, the Centre has revealed that there is increasing evidence of cyber bullying of children. For this purpose, those who peddle pornography resort to hacking of children’s profiles and their e-mail accounts. They also use blackmailing techniques to promote their trade. Also revealing is the use of peer-to-peer technology to distribute and share child images.

More interesting is the trend among UK paedophiles to travel extensively outside their own country to promote and partake of questionable images. This is based on the assessment that the risk of getting caught is much lower in developing countries whose police forces accord a very low priority to tracking down child pornography.

While CEOP has tremendous potential in offering protection to children and reassuring parents concerned about the dangers of exposure of modern children to crime on the Net, equally heart-warming is the decision of the UK government to form a Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS), that will bring under one umbrella about 100 private and public organisations and work towards making the Internet safer for the young surfer.

The move is the outcome of a government-sponsored report last year by Dr Tanya Brown, called ‘Safer Children in a Digital World’ .

This council will report directly to the Prime Minister and apply itself to tackling problems, such as cyber bullying and violence in video games.

The Council will provide a voice to the younger parents in formulating the strategy for a safer Internet. This is a laudable initiative, something that the Indian government may like to emulate.

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

More Stories on : Security | Children & Parenting | Security Musings

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