Online child sexual abuse: a social pandemic fuelled by Covid 19
- ricrotaract
- Sep 6, 2021
- 4 min read
The Covid 19 pandemic has come with its unique set of challenges ranging from medical to livelihood difficulties, b ut what we see is just the tip of the iceberg. What many of us may not be aware of is that within the pandemic of Covid 19, lies another social pandemic; the exploitation and abuse of children especially on online platforms.
National Child Protection Authority Sri Lanka (NCPA) revealed that they had received 8165 complaints of child sexual exploitation in 2020. The abuse of children, especially on online platforms has been deemed as an ongoing issue for many years, so why was there an exponential increase in the time of the pandemic? Covid 19 has driven the closure of schools and has given rise to digital learning platforms. If used responsibly online learning can provide limitless learning opportunities for children including broadening their horizons and social networking. However, this also consequentially means that children are spending more time confined to their homes with increased screen presence and limited supervision. This confinement has proved to be an opportunity for predators to reach children through means such as social media, online gaming platforms, and other chat rooms.
One shared emotion that felt by us all during the lockdown period was that of isolation, but this was the very emotion that made children more vulnerable to online perpetrators. Many abusers exploited this situation to build trusting relationships with unsuspecting children, intending to abuse them. This is also known as online grooming. The lack of personal contacts and supervision has led to an increase in risk-taking by minors and predators being able to coerce children to send sexually abusive material. Increased screen presence for children also meant that there was an increase in the risk of them being exposed to abusive content.
Another disturbing trend that emerged was increasing activity on the dark web. Offenders with technical expertise have resorted to creating online forums on the dark web to share and consume child abuse material and it was also revealed that the searches for child pornography content had also increased during this period. Another aspect of this is cybersex trafficking, where child sexual exploitation is live-streamed in return for payment. The fact that some of these cases are interfamilial is certainly devastating. This indicates that family members are forcefully engaging children in abusive conduct to get a payment in return and these children are even unable to escape from these situations due to the lockdowns.
It also should be taken to attention that all resources were being strained to contain the spread of the virus. This meant that the law enforcement didn’t have enough specialized human resources dedicated towards child protection and cyber-bullying as they were reassigned to other activities regarding the pandemic. With online child abuse cases being reported twice as much and only half capacity available, this inevitably meant disaster.
In a situation as distressing as this, an important question that arises is; what can be done to protect children from these online predators. Awareness is the first step towards protection. Not all children will have the knowledge on how to stay safe online and in some cases, these predators might be someone the child knows, so they might welcome it at first. Enlightening children about this alarming situation should start at home. Some measures that parents can take to protect their kids could be setting up parental controls or setting a time limit to access the internet etc. Even though it has improved in recent times, many still consider this topic taboo, thus it is critical that parents have open conversations to enlighten their children. This also includes having a healthy and trusting relationship such that children wouldn’t hesitate to reach out to their parents.
UNICEF also recommends that schools should enhance their safety measures especially in virtual learning platforms and continue to educate children about online child sexual exploitation. All child protection authorities and hotlines should be kept open while tech companies should also update safety measures on their platforms.
The suffering of a victimized child is prolonged, as each time an abuse material is re-shared or re-viewed the innocent child is being re-victimized. What might not cross many people’s minds is that online abuse doesn’t only stay online. This would affect the child’s daily life and their mental wellbeing. We as a community also have the responsibility of protecting our children. Even though raising awareness is also important, it is essential to do whatever it is in our capacity to protect them. This includes being alert to any signs of distress that children might show and reporting any suspicions of abuse or exploitation to respective authorities. The hotline for Sri Lanka is given below;
National Child Protection Authority (NCPA): Child helpline – 1929
This cannot be changed by one or two people, but it is the responsibility of the entire society to develop an environment where all children feel safe.
Content By: Rtr. Purrvaja Jayakumar, 2nd Year, BSc. Data Science and Business Analytics
Design By: Rtr. Zikra Haris, 2nd Year, BSc. Data Science and Business Analytics
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