James Kirk Jones

child pornography

child abuse victim

NEW DELHI: The arrest of American linguistics expertlast week for possessing and sharing nearly 30,000 files ofhad jolted Hyderabad. Recent government data shows the rot runs deeper: alongside metros, many of India’s tier-II cities are among the worst lot on surfing and sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Amritsar, Lucknow, Alappuzha and Thrissur were among the 10 worst cities where CSAM was shared on multiple occasions in the past six months. Amritsar took top place with more than 4.3 lakh “files of interest” — code for child porn — shared between July 1, 2016 and January 15, 2017. Delhi was second, followed by Lucknow."There are cities like Agra, Kanpur, Barrackpore and Dimapur where we had not seen any surfing for CSAM (child sexual abuse material) until six months ago. Here too there is significant growth,” said a government source.The data is limited to IP addresses originating in the country, but there are several instances of surfers using TOR (The Onion Router) to mask or reroute their IP address, making it appear as if they are based in another country, to avoid being tracked. Online child porn is directly linked to offline child abuse “For every child porn video, there is asomewhere,” said Vidya Reddy from Tulir — Centre for the Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse. “The accessibility of technology has ensured that CSAM is more easily available than ever before,” she added. In fact, Jones was also using a peer-to-peer, filesharing network — Giga-Tribe, to stay in contact with 490 ‘like-minded’ friends.Despite the large volume of child porn being shared through private social media groups, reporting remains abysmally low. The National Crime Records Bureau has registered just about 1,540 cases of online child sexual abuse in 2015-16. If not for an Interpol alert, Jones too would have flown under the radar. In fact, according to cyber crime law expert Prashant Mali, few people even realise that watching or downloading child porn is a crime.“Under the present laws, watching or sharing such material is a non-bailable offence attracting up to 7 years imprisonment and a Rs 10 lakh penalty,” says Mali. A major hurdle in the detection of online CSAM is the international nature of the crime. “A person could ostensibly view porn in India, which may have its server in Russia, its pay-site in Scotland and be hosted in Austria,” says Reddy of Tulir. “We need a transnational police force with state-ofthe-art forensic laboratories and a cohesive policy .” A step in the right direction was taken this week by Union minister Maneka Gandhi, who announced the establishment of a national alliance that would coordinate with law enforcement agencies, ministries, information technology experts, Interpol, and NGOs to curb the proliferation of CSAM online. The alliance will achieve its objective by blocking websites that host CSAM, setting up a hotline for complaints and placing restrictions on the travel of known sex offenders into the country. The minister has already written to the MEA asking for such visa restrictions be put in place.