Parents, Beware! Your child could be in danger...

A `15 year old girl' courts a 16 year old boy through a popular Internet chat website. The boy runs away from home to Mumbai only to find that the `girl' was in fact a 30-year-old man. The man sexually abuses the boy, steals his money and severely beats him up.

• A 14-year-old boy raked up bills of thousands of rupees on his father's credit card after he got addicted to viewing pornographic websites. The websites had claimed that they required the credit card number only for verifying that the viewer was an adult. In reality, these websites fraudulently billed the innocent holders of these credit cards.
• A 13-year-old girl creates a virus by downloading a free 'Virus development Kit' from the Internet. She intends to ruin the science project of her classmate. She sends the virus to a classmate. The classmate's father uses his child's computer and unwittingly sends out official mails with the virus attached. This results in huge data losses for several organizations.
• A Class X student, who was taunted by his classmates for having a pockmarked face, puts up a pornographic website and displays nude 'morphed' images of his classmates and teachers. 

Beware! The Internet is just not about chatting and emails. There are very real concerns that need to be tackled here and these incidents only go to show the seriousness of the problems caused by the usage of Internet by children. The Internet is an enriching tool and opens up new vistas for both children and adults but it can be quite damaging when left to young hands without any kind of restrictions.

To tackle this abuse of children through the misuse of modern technology, Asian School of Cyber Law(ASCL), Pune has launched FACT (Freedom from Abuse of Children through Technology). ASCL was established in 1999 to facilitate awareness, study and advanced research in cyber law and information security. The organization provides educational and training programs in cyber law, information security and cyber crime investigation. In these fields, it has been working closely with several educational institutions, corporate houses, law enforcement agencies and Government departments, both within India and abroad.

FACT is a five-pronged program, that will focus on educating the children on the perils of surfing the Internet and how they could safeguard themselves, educating the parents on how to monitor the Internet activities of their children to prevent any untoward incidents. The Asian School has also planned to hold awareness programs in schools to equip schools with the requisite tools to inculcate in their curriculum awareness programs on dangers of the Internet.

Said Rohidas Nagpal President, ASCL," We have a Computer Emergency Response Team here that tackles such issues. Of late, however we have been getting reports that children are getting increasingly affected and therefore we decided to launch FACT."

FACT can be downloaded from the ASCL website. This is a booklet that aims to educate parents, children and teachers about the need to protect children from Internet abuse. "Due to free availability of information on the Internet, a major risk that a child may be exposed to is inappropriate material, sexual, hateful or violent in nature, or encourages activities that are dangerous or illegal. And children have a lot of money these days. It is not really expensive to chat from your local cyber cafe," Nagpal explained.

Moreover, despite being illegal, online gambling sites are flooding the Internet. It is unsuitable for children to view or participate in these. Most online gambling sites require a person to use a credit card. This poses a potential threat to the financial well being of the family as well. Some of the websites and newsgroups promote the use of drugs, tobacco and alcohol. Some websites even teach how to make bombs or download virus development kits. "Pedophiles seeking children as targets have used email and chat tools to gain a child's confidence and then arrange a face-to-face meeting. Once the child's confidence has been won and a meeting is arranged, the child is in great danger of physical harm and permanent psychological scarring," Nagpal pointed out. 

Nagpal has been instrumental in solving such cases earlier and therefore decided to educate people through this booklet that talks about the online risks that children face, the reasons for concern and the rules for online safety. The Asian School has also been working closely with the Malaysian police and has organized a 10-day training program for their officials in August, among other things. Back home, the Ministry of IT, has urged the organization to work on `Framing the draft rules/regulation under Information Technology Act 2000' for forming a code of conduct for cyber cafes and chat rooms. 

Nagpal believes that the draft should be ready in a couple of weeks. The Asian School has prepared 2000 copies of FACT for distribution and is now planning to tap 25 schools in Pune for this effort. "We shall soon be going to schools in Delhi and Bangalore. Over 1,500 people have downloaded the booklet from the site," Nagpal said.

Nagpal has a piece of advice for those who believe that they remain anonymous when they log in and send defamatory mails. " It is possible to track a person down through his email account," he cautioned.

Nanda Kasbe

(CNS)