I’m sure you have come across some kind of porn including children over the internet, and you paused and mentally screamed because of what the world has come to (unless you are a pedophile).
Even if you wanted to do something about it, you didn’t know what to, because reporting it to the police is too time consuming (does that really matter though?) and on the top of that the police isn’t much effective?
Finally, India has come to terms with the fact that child pornography is a serious issue that needs to be tackled, if not burnt down to the roots.
An e-hotline that is a collaboration between Aarambh Initiative, an organization working on child protection in the country and the UK based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has been launched which would help people report any content over the web that has even the slightest hints of child sexual abuse.
“Prerana’s Aarambh India Initiative has partnered with the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation to implement India’s first reporting button for child sexual abuse images and videos on the internet. The reporting button will enable citizens of India to report child sexual abuse images and videos in a safe and anonymous environment”, their website reported.
“There is no proper online redressal available, you have to take the complaint offline,” Siddharth Pillai, the co-director of Aarambh explained his initiative.
You can report the crime either in English or in Hindi on aarambindia.org. The e-hotline is basically a five step online form where the option of maintaining anonymity is also provided. IWF would further analyse the report, and work on to take down the content and prevent any copy of the image or video from being circulated.
With the help of the IWF’s 120 partners, such as tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, the material is traced to where the server is hosted. It is then blocked, eventually removed from the Internet and the information shared with police for prosecution.
Though it is unknown as to how many cases of children made to expose their sexual organs or are forced to engage in sexual acts, because of the age old phenomenon of Indians, i.e. the fear of being humiliated and embarrassed, there were 96 reports of children in India being sexually exploited in online imagery in 2015 – a rise of 140 percent from 2014, according to National Crimes Records Bureau data.
Even though we are moving in the right direction, we are lagging far behind the world in protecting the children of this country. We know that this step should have come from the government, but well, who are we to question the supreme entity!
Do your bit, safeguard the innocence of children, it would just take five minutes of your life to curb an illegal and inhumane activity.
If you liked reading this, take a look at:
http://edtimes.in/2015/04/child-sexual-abuse-lets-talk-about-it/
