Press Releases
- Children?s Organisations across the World Call for Action on Internet Safety - 2005-04-20
- An explosion in the production and distribution of child pornography online.
- Resulting sexual abuse of children to make pornography circulated online.
- Sexual predators using chat rooms and messaging to contact and ‘groom’ children for sexual abuse, often with tragic consequences.
- Children being encouraged to post online personal details, photos and videos of themselves and others, or to send them via email or mobile phones to strangers.
- Exposing children and young people to abusive and damaging materials online, whether legal or illegal.
Today children’s organizations in 67 countries are uniting to call on the world’s leading Internet and high tech companies to take responsibility for ensuring children’s safety online. The call comes at the launch of the worldwide make-IT-safe campaign led by ECPAT International, a global child-rights NGO based in Bangkok, Thailand, and the UK-based Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety (CHIS).
Bishwo Ram Khadka
CHIS spokesman and UK Internet safety expert John Carr says the IT industry must do much more to protect children and young people using its technologies.
“Children are constant and large scale users of the Internet yet daily, across the world, they are being exposed to harmful or damaging materials online and we continue to read of tragic instances of children being abused by sexual predators where the Internet played a key part in facilitating the initial contact that led to the abuse.
“When dealing with issues such as spam, viruses, phishing and other threats, the internet and online industries have shown a great willingness and a great ability to come together to develop common technical standards and protocols, and to agree common, effective means of promoting them. This has simply not happened in the field of child protection. This must change. And soon.”
The make-IT-safe campaign will lobby government, IT leaders and companies to create a global child protection body to set and implement worldwide industry standards, research safety technologies, and fund a global educational campaign.
The campaign will also urge governments to adopt IT child protection policies to ensure industry responsibility, to enable international legal co-operation against online child abuse, and to provide care and protection for children abused or exposed to harmful images and messages online.
ECPAT International executive director Carmen Madriñán says it’s time for the IT industry to acknowledge that it shares the same responsibility for protecting children as all other members of the global community.
“Parents, teachers, children’s groups and governments all have their part to play. But only the IT industry can deliver the technological and financial resources to ensure the safety of children and young people online and in interactive technologies.”
Ms Madriñán says some IT companies are concerned to ensure their technologies are safe for children, but it’s not nearly enough. The proof is seen daily in the courts, the news and in thousands of harmed children.
“Now it’s time for concerned IT companies to take the lead and ensure effective, global standards to make IT safe for all children and young people.”
ECPAT International's Asia youth representative Sangeet Shirodkar is calling on young people to take up the make-IT-safe campaign.
He says that the IT industry should take responsibility for educating young people about the dangers of chat rooms and of circulating personal details and photos via cell phones.
The make-IT-safe campaign is supported by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. It is also backed by the Subgroup against Sexual Exploitation of Children of the NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Maiti Nepal, a leading social organization working for and with children and women is taking the initiatives to launch this campaign, plan for preventive measures, advocacy and lobbying and in organizing awareness activities at different levels targeting mainly children and young people in the near future with close cooperation and support from the High Level Commission for Information Technology (HLCIT) of His Majesty Government of Nepal (HMG-N), Computer Association of Nepal (CAN), Internet Service Providers Association of Nepal (ISPAN) and some other relevant organizations and individuals. This group has recently met for the first time exploring at this sensitive issue and has decided to form a Steering Committee fairly soon. The support and commitment made by each and every individual of this group has been remarkable and is a good beginning within the context of Nepal.
Besides, the Cyber Policy and the Regulations relating to the computer offence of HMG-Nepal will certainly prove to be of big help in many different ways to protect children and young people against online child abuse and exposure to harmful images and messages through interactive information technology.
The make-IT-safe campaign is running a global online petition and lobbying IT leaders and governments around the world. Industry and government responses will be monitored and publicized on the campaign website.
For additional information, please contact Mr. Bimol Bhetwal or email at project@maitinepal.org
Director
Maiti Nepal
ECPAT International Board member
Kathmandu, Nepal
Tel: +1-4494816/4492904
Fax:+1-4489978
http://www.maitinepal.org//
http://www.ecpat.org
