CHILD PORNOGRAPHY ON INTERNET
Why in news?
- Search engine google has informed the Delhi High Court that there is an ongoing effort to develop more effective automated tools to prevent hosting of of child pornographic content on it platform.
- As per the Article 9 of the Cyber Crime Convention, 2001, child pornography includes: “pornographic material that visually depicts: a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct and a person appearing to be a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”
Data related to child pornography
- Consumption of child pornography after the lockdown in the country has gone up by 95% with online data monitoring websites.
- The India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) said in a statement that Traffic from India increased by 95% between March 24 and 26, as compared to average traffic before the lockdown.
- Key word searches related to child porn incresed significantly.
- In a survey conducted on demand for child pornography in 100 cities in december 2019, it was found that there were 5 million downloads on average per month.
CHALLENGES IN DEALING WITH ONLINE CHILD PORNOGRAPHY
- Dark web is often used to distribute child pornography. Dark web is out of ambit of any regulation.
- Social media and chatting apps like WhatsApp, Facebook have become medium of online chld pornography. Their content remains encrypted and cannot be put under surveillance.
- Though artificial intelligence and machine learning is used to prevent the uploading of child pornographic content in respect of any known and reported image. However, any minor change in the property of image would enable it to evade discovery through automated processes.
IMPACT OF CHILD ABUSE:
- A threat : Such social isolation and discrimination hamper their education and other developmental opportunities.
The Adhoc Committee of the Rajya instituted by Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu has made far-reaching recommendations to prevent sexual abuse of children and to contain access to and transmission of child pornography content on social media.
- The committee has recommended important amendments to the POCSO Act, 2012 and the IT Act, 2000 besides technological, institutional, social and educational measures and state-level initiatives.
- It has recommended a broader definition of child pornography for legal purposes.
- The new definition “Any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a child which include photographs, video, digital or computer generated image indistinguishable from an actual child and an image created, adapted or modified but appear to depict a child”.
- It has proposed for making internet service providers (ISPs) accountable for the availability of such content.
- ISPs are to identify and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as well as report such content and those trying to access them to the authorities under the national cybercrime portal.
- The amended law will also apply to pornographic content where adults or young adults pretend to be children.
- The fine for possessing child porn but not deleting or reporting it is increased to ₹5,000 from the earlier proposal of ₹1,000.
- If a person stores such content for distributing it further, except for when presenting it in court as evidence, he could face a punishment of upto three years.
- It has called for strengthening the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) so that it can serve as the nodal body for curbing child pornography.
- NCPCR should include technology to curb circulation of child porn such as breaking end-to-end encryption to trace its distributors of child pornography, mandatory applications to monitor children’s access to pornographic content, employing photo DNA to target profile pictures of groups with CSAM.
- To strengthen state-level implementation it has recommended appointing ‘safety commissioners’ in every state, who could monitor the reporting of sexual exploitation of children on social media.
Other recommendations
- Children should be taught to remain safe while using internet.
- Awareness in schools regarding such abuses
- Parents should be educated regarding any changed behavior of their child, counselling them.
- Government should set up one stop reporting window for such content
Issues with these recommendations:
- Some of the recommendations are expected to lead to concerns over privacy and misuse.
- It is believed that asking ISPs to report content in addition to blocking and filtering may not be practical.
- The suggestion to break encryption could also just lead to traffic moving to different platforms.
Conclusions
- India being one the youngest nations in the world has a large population of Children to account for. There is various form of exploitation that a child of tender age could meet with but sexual exploitation is the more severe one as it leaves a deep and mammoth impact on the child for the rest of the life, so laws should be framed in accordance so that this problem can be tackle out. The present technology needs to be improved to churn out child pornography from the internet. Moreover, the law enforcement agencies, must evolve to meet the needs of the society and protect the interests of the children.