Abduction-Internet could expose children to captors

He walks into the house every school day with his smart phone in hand; frantically typing on its keypad, barely looking where he is going, then quickly ascends the stairs of their family house, to the computer room.

Once in the room, Jack, 8, locks himself inside and disappears into the cyber world of games and chats for hours. The IT illiterate house-help likes the good riddance. His mother will walk in at 8pm, tired like a donkey and get a report that Jack is upstairs doing homework. His dad has binge drinking to do before staggering home, late.

Michael is a brilliant four-year-old. At his age, he charms almost every visitor to their house off their phones and engages in phone games.

Two weeks ago, his uncle visited with a smart phone that had a phone code 20 minutes later, Michael was asking his uncle in the presence of his shocked parents who the naked woman in his phone photos was; the code notwithstanding.

Twenty years ago, mobile telephony and Internet access in Kenya were luxuries that few could afford. That was the tech-challenged era in which most current parents grew up. Today, more and more children are mastering the art of searching the Internet; a world designed mostly by adults for adults.

The latest research (2010) from Synovate Research Group indicates that at least 3.5 million Kenyans access Internet regularly. There is no empirical data available on the number of children who use Internet in Kenya. However, many of us have home Internet access where we live with our children.

Further complicating this is the increasing usage of Internet-enabled phones by children of tender age, as low as seven years. It is estimated by children’s social sites that the average age at which a child takes his or her first step online is between five and six years. However, in major cities, that age can be as low as three or four years.

With such common knowledge of Internet usage by children, many adults have been debating at length on whether to allow children to use the World Wide Web or not. The majority of researchers, specialists and ordinary users, undoubtedly affirm with a YES.

They opine that the Internet goes a long way in helping the children to study, to develop and to learn the art of virtual communication which has become such an inseparable part of the modern world. And who wants his or her child to be backward and disadvantaged on the global front?

To revert to the naysayers, experts say that there is an Internet for a child that is considered to be ‘safe’. It is a special zone similar to a dedicated children’s playground in the real world where children can communicate with their friends and play different games together. Further to such friendly safe zones, there also exist sites that are online versions of children’s books: fairy tales, poems, educational books and even colouring books that can easily be found on the shelves of the children’s Internet. Special search engines indexes only children’s pages that are created entirely for junior Internet users.

The naysayers, however, pull this logic too far with such shocking research and compelling arguments in favour of banning the use of the Internet by children. The resonating principle in their argument is how delicate a child’s mind is and how such minds can be adversely affected by ‘adult’ content.

They state that there are no measures in place to protect children from cyber bullying, pornography, sexual harassment and several other dangers. How do you deal with an adult stranger who wants to meet your 10-yearold daughter who he met on Facebook? How do you start repairing the conscience of your son after an online acquaintance wrote something obscene or posted an obscene photo online?

Forget Facebook, Tweeter and the new media social site. The safe children Internet sites have been found to have adult content inside some links.

Although supporters of Internet usage by children say that such can be remedied by moderators whose task it is to monitor the content, these moderators cannot check every message. Popular forums often create special threads where users can inform moderators of malware or porn links placed on the websites. Undoubtedly, responsible users are very important, but if they complain of a malicious link, it means children who are reporting these have already followed it, viewed it and suffered exposure.

Further exacerbating the debate is the popular finding by law enforcement agents that most convicted paedophiles are regular visitors to children’s networking sites. They pretend to be children chatting or playing online games with other children. For the parents asking ‘’so what?’’ to this, this is how online gaming and chatting works.

Your eight-year-old daughter can play an innocent chess game with Varlie in Russia from the comfort of your sitting room. The chess game your daughter is playing has pop-up chatting options where the two players can chat and perhaps discuss the game.

Two obvious dangers here; that Varlie playmate of your daughter is not necessarily Russian, could be anyone, a male adult perhaps, a paedophile or actually a fellow innocent child. Two, in these online chats, children like to boast on how much they know – they could easily tell a complete online stranger details about their names, phone numbers, home address and even plan to do a face-to-face meeting without informing you – the parent.

According to nominated MP Millie Odhiambo: ‘There is need to effectively control the harmful data accessed by children on the Internet…a child can pretend he is playing games on his phone yet he is engaging in inappropriate conversations with a 60-year-old.’

Other than the paedophiles, fraudsters abound online. Many children’s websites have those Ads by Google which ask children to buy ‘educational grants’ or buy some CD worth 75USD with educational materials. Further to these are downloads, such as games and eBooks with malwares and viruses that can crash your computer.

With such demonisation of a useful resource as the Internet, the question still remains; do we allow children to surf the Internet? Whatever you might be afraid of as a parent, the answer must be YES. Yes because the opportunities for learning about the world and the amount of knowledge available on the Internet are practically boundless compared to hardcopy sources such as the good old encyclopaedia.

By preventing a child from using the Internet, adults deprive them of access to the world’s biggest source of information. Additionally, children need to know how to communicate in the virtual world as much as they do in the real one.

Internationally, there are specific laws or statutory bodies to protect children from Internet harm such as the Children’s Internet Protection Act of the US or the state-funded UK Council for Child Internet Safety, which brings together social networking sites and technology firms. The Kenyan law has a lacuna on this.

Although the Kenya Information and Communications Act makes an attempt in Part VI A,it does not suffice to protect children when they are online. The Children’s Act does not have explicit mention of issues to do with the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) and child protection. The Sexual Offences Act has a small section on pornography, which barely deals with such cases.

It was not until recently that the Microsoft East Africa Limited, the Kenyan government and The children’s foundation CRADLE teamed up to inform parents and protect children against Internet abuse.

According to Mark Matunga, the Education and Citizenship Programme Manager with Microsoft East Africa Limited: ‘The programme consists of establishing parameters that parents can use to block certain Websites, computer games and search terms.’ Brian Weke of CRADLE is currently advocating for a law to protect children against Internet harm.

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