Editorial

Sri Lanka is beset by an alarming crisis that is receiving scant attention from policymakers: online violence against and exploitation of children, including the production and widespread dissemination of child porn, cyber extortion, receiving indecent text messages, cyberbullying, and even online gambling for children among a string of other crimes.

Three out of 10 Sri Lankan children face some type of online violence, a 2021 study by Save the Children organisation has found. The range of offences is wide and varied.

The US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which tabulates country reports, revealed that in 2021 alone, its tip line recorded a staggering 152,811 incidents of online child sexual exploitation and abuse content hosted from Sri Lanka.

Law enforcement agencies in Sri Lanka say the complaints roll in every day and are piling up. Parental supervision is weak given today’s socio-economic conditions where both parents are at work but the biggest hurdle to doing anything about these crimes against children by predators behind a computer is that available domestic legislation is wholly inadequate.

Not even the recent controversial Online Safety Draft Bill took cognisance of the dire situation related to online child sex material. There is no information on investigations to get to the bottom of who generates this content. And at the present level of crime, the caseload is impossible for Sri Lankan courts to tackle.

While Sri Lanka has ratified all the necessary UN conventions and optional protocols, domestic legislation has not been brought in line. One reason could be that implementation is difficult, and will require internet service providers to introduce strict controls that could make their customer base unhappy. But the situation in Sri Lanka with regards to online child sexual exploitation is beyond serious.

The country does not even have laws to remove illegal content quickly or to prevent it from appearing in the first place. There is nothing to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content. The gaps are yawning.

Yet the government’s recent Online Safety Bill addressed none of these issues. This could be because, as a Presidential Committee pointed out, there is “a poor status of knowledge and understanding among political decision-makers and high levels of government about the real threats that children face”. They don’t know what tech-based and innovative measures they can and must take; or there is no effort at international cooperation which is essential to address a problem that has no boundaries.

This epidemic of online crimes against children cannot, and must not, be put off any longer. There are international road maps for legislation and implementation. Any delay in adopting a similar strategy is a dereliction of duty by those in government.

Save the Children – II

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting not just the Palestinian non-state actor Hamas, but for his own political survival at home. He is engulfed with corruption charges, demographic changes and attempts to increase his own powers, and now allegations of inefficiency for allowing Hamas to stage a daring and brutal terrorist assault inside Israel on October 7.

With the (im)moral backing of the United States, which asked him to defend Israel by doing whatever it takes, Netanyahu is on a crazed binge to occupy further the Occupied Territories of Palestine whatever the human cost, especially children and whatever overwhelming world opinion is stacked against him and his nation.

The aerial bombings of hospitals, schools, refugee camps and private apartments in Gaza on the pretext of smoking out and neutralising the Hamas cadres from their tunnelled hideouts have been flippantly dismissed as a ‘tragedy of war’ by his spokesman.

Make no mistake, what Hamas did on that fateful day of October 7 was nothing but an act of terrorism. Yes, the Palestinians have a long history of discrimination and harassment but still, the indiscriminate killings that day of civilians were reminiscent of the terrorism that plagued this country for 30 long years from the bombings of the Central Bank and passenger trains to killings of pilgrims at Anuradhapura, student monks and villagers by a local terrorist group, the LTTE. Hamas also took civilian hostages, both young and old, and is holding them as a negotiation strategy – something even the dreaded LTTE didn’t do.

Why Sri Lanka could not vote for a Canadian amendment at the UN, which India did, was because it condemned only Hamas terrorism. And why it cannot possibly justify Israel’s heavy-handed response against a non-state actor resorting to terrorism (like LTTE did) is because that response is vastly disproportionate, and indiscriminate, amounts to ethnic cleansing and taking place in Occupied Territories.

If this is a war to a finish, as the Israeli government has said it is, and what many say is “a textbook case of genocide” committed by Israel, it is also a shame for Israel’s much-vaunted Defence Forces (IDF) that they need to resort to carpet bombings of civilians and a scorched earth policy after a siege to win their war, as they know is not going to be a walk in the park.

From an apocalyptic situation, there’s an impending Armageddon playing out with the likelihood of the inhuman military assault escalating into a regional conflict and then the very real possibility of a Ukraine-style proxy world war involving the United States and Russia. Iran-backed non-state actors have now successfully split the US-Saudi-Egypt-Jordan axis that was diminishing Iran’s influence in the region. The Russia-Iran nexus can draw a reluctant China into play.  There is a resurrection of a world already riven on Global North-South lines. Not that the Global South is entirely united. India broke away, supporting Israel. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which had the Palestinian issue high on its menu for global injustice is deafeningly silent, its current chairman Azerbaijan making profits selling its oil to Israel.

This has resulted in cynicism and a rejection of the values and justice in foreign policy. On Friday, President Ranil Wickremesinghe questioned Western double standards that question Sri Lanka’s war against terror and zip up on Israel’s merciless onslaught in Palestine.

For Sri Lanka, desperately trying to raise its head from its own economic disaster, relying as it does on remittances from its workers in West Asia, the threat of oil prices rising and the world already in recession, a catastrophic situation is in the making.