Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Beware vultures in online culture!

CHENNAI: Hanging out in cybercafés, online gaming , exploring virtual worlds, or opening online profiles for instant messages, and photos are great for meeting new people, sharing interests or reuniting with lost friends.

But, U.K. experts told schoolchildren in the city on Wednesday, these forums are peppered by predators who make use of people’s personal information, often given when their guard is down. The worst of these will take advantage sexually, they say.

There aren’t many facts and figures available about “online grooming” in India. Online grooming is a term used for the repeated contact that cyber-predators culture with their victims, usually children.

They can scan personal information, create new identities that match up interests, casually get to know their victims and before long be persuading them to meet alone for seemingly innocuous activities like football practice, which then turn sinister. Predators can lie about their age, their sex, and even put up fake pictures or videos.

When Jason Steele, European Union Internet Safety Project Manager, showed a crowded room of 300 Class XI students at Lady Andal School reconstructed events on video and said that ThinkuKnow, the U.K. organisation he works with, received 600 emails from youngsters requesting help every month, the room held its breath.

“Most of us know that putting our phone numbers or addresses on our profile pages is not a good idea, but I had no idea that something like this could happen from networking online” said one class prefect.

Tellingly, almost everyone in the class used the internet daily, at least half had profiles on sites such as Orkut. Most also had their email address displayed.

Some were sophisticated enough to post videos through YouTube and a significant number shyly raised their hands when asked if they had discovered that the latest hip mp3 they thought they had downloaded was actually something “bad”.

ThinkuKnow is run by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a nodal agency involving government, not-for-profit organisations and the U.K. police.

In India, many organisations are still in the process of understanding the connection between the cyber world and abuse, said Vidya Reddy of the Tulir Centre for the Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse.

The situation in the country could be serious, she believes. “In India, families will often frown on interpersonal relationships between boys and girls in person, but they have no idea about what’s going on online,” she said, adding that teenagers could turn to online interactions they may not have control over. “The anonymity the net provides means they may push boundaries without thinking about the consequences,” she said.

This year, she knows of 12 such instances, but fears there are many more because of the fast growing rate of Internet users.

A booklet on how to be safe online has been put together by police cyber crime cells, but modifications to the Information Technology Act agreed by the Central government last September to make online grooming illegal have yet to be presented in Parliament.

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