18 June 2009
Johannesburg — JUST two months ago, 17-year-old Durban schoolboy Rodney Chetty was beaten up, allegedly by the outraged father of a schoolmate. This was after he had allegedly sent the girl an SMS saying he loved her and wanted to have a sexual relationship with her.
Durban's Tribune Herald newspaper reported that the schoolmates exchanged cellphone numbers and chatted using MXit, the free instant messaging software application developed in SA. But at some stage the girl's mother took over the MXit conversation. The result was parental outrage over what was being said, which turned into a beating with a metal bar for the boy.
Chetty's experience highlights something important: internet and cellphones with internet access are being used increasingly in communicating, sometimes with negative results. And it is very easy for someone to pretend to be someone else when using them .
Technology is wonderfully useful, but some use it negatively, says CyberAdvice MD Daniella Kafouris.
One of the biggest concerns for parents and teachers is the rise of cyber- bullying -- using these technologies to bully a victim -- which poses myriad problems, because the person doing the bullying is not always identified, and they are not always one person, she says.
More frightening, however, could be the "peer" on the other end of an online or MXit conversation with your child. He may not actually be a 14-year-old with similar growing pains, but a 40-year-old paedophile with an assumed persona, she says.
These predators use such personae to establish a trusting relationship with a child. This can lead to them asking the child for photographs in increasingly suggestive poses, unwittingly creating images that are used in child pornography, says Kafouris.
SA's population is about 47-million people, of which nearly 9,5-million have access to the internet via their cellphones compared with the estimated 5-million who use desktop computers , according to Vodacom mobile advertising MD Rick Joubert.
The rate at which South Africans gain access to digital and communication technology should be a warning to parents and police. Greater internet access means greater access to illicit material such as child porn, and to those who manufacture it, says a 2007 Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) study for the Film and Publication Board (FPB) on the use of children in pornography in SA.
While children from better-off families that can afford desktop internet access may have been the most vulnerable to internet-based sexual abuse -- as the HSRC study states -- this is changing fast, as even the very poor are acquiring cellphones with internet access.
"It's happening even with kids from poverty-stricken areas. They are promised cellphones, airtime or clothes if they send images (of themselves or their friends via MMS). Some even agree to face-to-face meetings," says FPB Child Protection Unit head Goodness Zulu.
Many of these children do not know they are complicit in the creation of child pornography, and nor do their parents, if they have parents. Those who don't have parents to monitor carefully what they do online and explain the risks and responsibilities involved -- which all experts stress is of paramount importance -- are at heightened risk, says Zulu.
While experts believe that in SA it is still far more likely for a child to be sexually abused in a directly physical way, it is impossible to assess the extent of the availability of child sexual abuse images in SA, or to tell how many South African victims and perpetrators are involved, according to the HSRC research.
"Given its illicit nature, the full extent (of availability of child porn in SA) will never be known .... It is commonly accepted that sexual crimes against children are more likely than other crimes to escape the legal system," say researchers Prof Andrew Dawes and Advaita Govender.
But Zulu warns that the internet is "borderless", and children in SA are at risk from criminals all over the world. Even game consoles and PDAs (personal digital assistants) can link to the internet. Children who are not told of the risks can inadvertently create havoc by passing on even small snippets of information via social networking platforms from MXit to Facebook and MySpace.
It's called "social engineering". Wikipedia describes it as "the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information ... typically for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access". It has been used for everything from kidnapping -- although this has not been recorded in SA, according to Kafouris -- to cleaning out Dad's bank account or getting a child to click on an interesting looking internet link and inadvertently destroy a legitimate website.
Children -- and adults -- need to be very careful about what information they divulge over the internet and parents and teachers need to explain to their charges that their actions can have unintended consequences, says Kafouris.
"Children don't know that what they do today can (have an) impact on their future. Many companies Google you before they hire you ...
"You need to explain to children that manners and good behaviour extend to the internet. People know. People find out, and these days they can find out very quickly. Nothing travels as fast as (information on) the internet."
It is commonly accepted that sexual crimes against children are more likely than other crimes to escape the legal system
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