Remember The Titanic? When the tip of an iceberg literally sinks the ship that was described as “unsinkable”? Now transpose “unsinkable” with indestructible, the popular notions of Indian tradition and culture, replace that iceberg with child sexual abuse, add the murky depths of the Internet to the mix, and throw in the advances of technology for good measure. And what do we get? We get an industry that thrives on the sexual exploitation of children for adult pleasure and is conservatively estimated at around $3 billion. Remember also that this is an industry that is still far from mature.
India is a vast unknown in this territory, but a recent government study which covered 13 states and polled some 2,211 children (“Study of Child Abuse in India”, Women and Child Development Department, 2007) has turned up some startling facts. More than half of them said they had been sexually abused at some point. Over 100 children (nearly five per cent) said they had been photographed in the nude. Half of these children were in the 5-12 years age group. If you extrapolate these figures across the entire population there are tens of thousands of child victims.
The implications are enough to make any child
protection activist shiver. Vidya Reddy, executive director of Tulir — Centre for the Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse, admits that there are no statistics related to child pornography and India, but the progression is logical.
“We have huge numbers of vulnerable children being abused,” she says. “The Internet is so easy to access and the worldwide traffic in child pornography is massive and organised. It’s inevitable that images of some of these children will find their way online and that will fuel further abuse for profit.”
Who are the abusers? “Most of the children who were asked said they were photographed by friends and family.” So if your abuser is tech savvy, he’ll have a digital camera from which he can upload images to the Net. From there it can pass through thousands of hands. It’s as simple as that and extremely hard to detect, especially given that the vastness of the Web is enough to dwarf any police force, let alone India’s.
It should be noted that though Internet access in India is only at four per cent that still means 40 million people in cyberspace. The number is bound to grow and the problem of online predators will only get worse. It is estimated that by 2015 at least half the world’s online population will be from China and India.
With the Internet, proliferation is astonishingly quick. “Look at Russia,” Reddy says. “In 1995, none of the world’s abusive images of children were from Russia. By 2001, 45 per cent of the images were from Russia.” Her usage of the phrase “abusive images” is deliberate. “People tend to assume that child pornography means children watching porn whereas sexually exploitative images of children are images of abuse being committed, a crime being committed.”
As the Violence Against Children in Cyberspace report (ECPAT, 2005)) says, “A child in this situation may feel that the existence of imagery masks the violence they have experienced and makes them appear complicit…. Children are commonly made to smile, to seem compliant, in front of a camera. Consequently, the child fears being seen to have allowed the abuse…. Anxiety may intensify where a child understands that images of their abuse will continue to be replicated and circulated to an audience that is both nearby and global long into the future.”
This is why many countries, and even Interpol, have dedicated teams working on victim identification, to ensure that the children being abused in the photos can be rescued. Sadly, to date only a few hundred children have been located.
In India, however, the understanding that such images capture acts of sexual abuse against children, is yet to hit home. A video or image of a child engaging in sexual acts or being raped is first and foremost, documentation of abuse, a crime. Watching it makes the viewer, its consumer, complicit in that crime of abuse.
For instance, take the case of Will Heum, a Dutchman arrested in Chennai last October under the new Information Technology Act. Heum was arrested for uploading abusive images of children onto the Internet.
When the Chennai police made the raid and the arrest, child rights’ activists in the city were ecstatic. Heum was out on bail while being tried for charges of child sexual abuse seven years ago. Finally he had been caught under a tougher act, and that too for a non-bailable offence. There is one snag, though.
“They are not tracking down the children themselves. The victims!” Reddy exclaims.
As for the police, Dr M Sudhakar, assistant commissioner, heading Chennai’s Cyber Crime Bureau, is pleased with the department’s performance in this case. “This is probably the first time the new IT act was used to arrest someone for child pornography. And we took suo motu action in this case because we were acting on a tip off and there was no actual complainant,” he said, stressing that the department argued against giving Heum bail given the nature of his crimes.
Which brings us to the issue of sex itself. But even experienced and well-intentioned police officers like Sudhakar claim that child sexual abuse is less of a problem in India because of our “tradition and culture.”
“It is an unusual crime here. If you notice, even in the Will Heum case, the offender is a foreigner,” he says. But Reddy is firm that, “India is not different from any other culture in terms of our sexual proclivities.” The sooner we understand that, the better we’ll see that iceberg for what it truly is.
Myths busted
The classic image of an online predator is either one of those villains offering you millions from Nigeria, or a dirty old man hitting on your children in a chat room. Recent studies have shown that the image is a myth.
The Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (December 2008) on Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies busts this and other myths. It tells us that if your child meets a person encountered over the Internet she probably knows his real age and knows that the purpose of the meeting is sexual activity. It also says, contrary to popular belief, sexual solicitation is more reported by minors from other minors. And more importantly, your child is more likely to be affected by online bullying and harassment, largely from peers.
For instance, the Delhi Public School, MMS scandal in 2004 where a student filmed a female classmate perform a sexual act and tried to sell it online. Or the case in Kerala where three young women committed suicide after their classmates and rapists blackmailed them with a film of the rape.
Social networking sites and online games have only made young users more vulnerable.
This is where technology tries to make up, so that Parental Control can kick in online. Software limiting and monitoring Internet usage is widely available for these purposes. “But awareness of about such software is lacking in India,” Madan Menon, managing partner, Virtu Technologies, says. Virtu is marketing Net Nanny (pcchimp.com) one of the more popular parental control software online in India. “The software allows you to set different filters according to the child’s age group, bar net usage at particular hours and alert the parent when the child visits any inappropriate website or has a chat conversation that is leading to solicitation.” While not foolproof, such software is supposed to help.
ranjithagunasekaran@expressbuzz.com