Treacherous web

A spike in the creation and circulation of child porn calls for better surveillance and stronger law enforcement

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

The photograph was shot on what seems like a hillock. A girl who looks about nine years old squats on the ground. She casually holds an open book, unmindful that it is upside down, and looks into the camera with her eyes empty and her face blank. Next to her stands a thin boy, in his teens, holding the branch of a tree. He looks malnourished and his smile appears fake. Both children are naked.

It did not take Additional Director General of Police Manoj Abraham long to identify the location in the photograph as a rural area near Kochi. His team, which has been at the forefront of Kerala’s special drive against child pornography, traces such children by visiting the locations, but the parents often refuse to acknowledge that such a thing had happened. “We know it exists and it is widespread now more than ever with the cheaply and widely available access to smartphones and the internet,” said Abraham. “Child porn is a transnational crime, it is affecting every state, every country, and nobody is immune to it because sexual predators, especially pedophiles, exist everywhere.”

In the past 18 months of the pandemic, these predators have been thriving. In March, the United Nations Human Rights Council noted that the Covid-19 pandemic amplified the risk to vulnerable children from trafficking and sexual exploitation. While presenting a report on the impact of the coronavirus disease on different manifestations of the sale and sexual exploitation of children, the special rapporteur to the UNHRC said that the pandemic had “changed the pattern of sexual exploitation in which perpetrators were operating to produce, disseminate or consume child sexual abuse materials online.”