India Child Protection Fund ups fight against online child abuse; holds consultation with MP Govt.

To aggressively combat the growing threat of online sexual abuse of children in the state, a state consultation was held by India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) in collaboration with Department of Women and Child Development (WCD), Madhya Pradesh in Bhopal on Friday. The top officials who were part of the consultation included Vishal Nadkarni, Joint Director, WCD; R.K. Shukla, former DGP, Madhya Pradesh; O.P. Singh, former DGP, Uttar Pradesh and CEO, ICPF; and Manisha Sentiya, Additional Director, Education Department. The consultation discussed the multipronged strategies needed to find a robust way to tackle the growing threat of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in Madhya Pradesh.

Extending support on dealing with this growing menace in the state, Vishal Nadkarni, Joint Director, WCD said that the Department of Women and Child Development will support ICPF in all the future workshops and endeavours in the state so that awareness about CSAM can be generated at the grassroots level.

“We have stringent laws, agencies and experts to help children in such issues but the first key protectors are always going to be the families. So, it is important that we create awareness among families at grassroots level so that they can identify if their children are becoming victims of any kind of online abuse,” Vishal Nadkarni, Joint Director, WCD added.

As per a report on the sudden rise in CSAM in the nation post Covid-19 released by ICPF in April 2020, the demand for child pornography was an average of 5 million per month in 100 cities and only on the public web.

Speaking on the occasion, chief guest R.K Shukla, former DGP, Madhya Pradesh, said, “It is high time we make the issue of online child sexual abuse our priority. With the advent of internet in villages, cases of online sexual abuse of children have also increased rapidly. It is commendable that ICPF is working on this extremely challenging issue and taking it to the states. But now we need the whole society’s contribution to fight this battle.”

Emphasizing on the importance of such collaborations in the country, CEO of ICPF and former DGP, UP, O.P. Singh, said, “Online Child Sexual abuse is growing exponentially and is an organised crime, should be seen in the same line as terrorism.

Our children are exploited by predators sitting at different locations including international areas and there is huge involvement of monetary transactions. Therefore it is important to have a quality and time bound investigation and prosecution.”

During the consultation, it came to light that one of the major challenges is decoding CSAM cases from the source data which are received in CD format.

“Normally, e-CD has 600-800 cases of CSAM, as we don’t have any technical mechanism to extract data from the CD, it has to be done in a manual way and which leads to delay in investigation and affects the mental health of person working on it.

Therefore, there is a pressing need to have specialised software to speed up identification and timely investigation of the cases,” Vineeth Kapoor. DCP, Bhopal, said.

Speaking on the occasion, Manisha Sentiya, Additional Director, Education Department, said, “There has been increased usage of digital applications in recent years. There are about 20 lakh children at risk, therefore it is need of the hour to have awareness education on cyber hygiene, safety and security. It should also be included in the school curriculum, department will work on this.”

ICPF has been working extensively towards the online safety of children, with a special focus to combat online child sexual abuse. ICPF works closely with schools for raising awareness among children, parents, and teachers, and also partners with Law Enforcement Agencies across the country to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Other dignitaries from the ICPF, government and police departments included Sampurna Behura, Executive Director, ICPF; Yagya Meda, Assistant Director, WCD; Vineeth Kapoor, DCP, Bhopal; Vaibhav Srivastav, police department; and S.K. Somavanshi, police department.