Your children need your presence more than your presents.
– Jesse Jackson, American civil rights activist
By Datuk Dr Husin Jazri
In a world where digital technology influences our lives, the safety in the digital platform becomes a major concern. Nowadays, children use digital tablets and smartphones a lot more to surf the Internet. Watching videos online without close parental supervision, may easily be exposed to online predators.
When we were kids, we were told to avoid strangers due to fear of being harmed or kidnapped but nowadays strangers can go straight to our children via various online platforms and interactive games.
Children enjoy using social media applications such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate with their friends, and tune to latest fashion trends and trending stories.
Do observe how Korean culture penetrates our society even though we do not speak their language.
This is the power of digitisation and globalisation — enabling technology, its platform and digital content to penetrate our mind and soul in real-time.
Cybercriminals are taking advantage of this powerful and borderless technology and its applications. Online predators are waiting for the right opportunities to take advantage of our ignorance by exploiting our children and violating their privacy, such as capturing compromising photos or videos of children without parental consent and taking advantage of children’s naivety for evil purposes.
These are new concerns that parents are facing in this digitisation era as children are more engaging with digital gadgets at the early stage of their life. Unfortunately, parents are not aware of these digital dangers and are not trained with the right skillsets to keep their children safe online.
In April this year, Unicef issued a nine-page guideline handbook for parents and caregivers. With schools
closed and lockdowns imposed, many children and youngsters are spending their time at home. It is noted that children spent more time online, for much longer than usual due to movement restrictions of the pandemic.
However, spending time online comes with risks which we intend to highlight in this column.
Victimising children online is gaining popularity among paedophiles and online groomers. Online paedophiles are looking for every opportunity to prey on children online and the risks are higher during this pandemic.
In Malaysia, the Child Act 2001 and the Sexual Offences Against Children Act 2017 should be the primary legislation to deal with children. Under Section 31 of the Child Act, sexual abuse of a child and even causing or permitting a child to be abused is a crime. Offenders stand to be sentenced to a maximum of 20 years imprisonment or fined up to RM50,000 or both.
In the Sexual Offences Against Children Act, crimes include sexually communicating with a child (section 11, maximum three years imprisonment), child grooming (section 12, maximum five years imprisonment and whipping), meeting, following child grooming (section 13, maximum 10 years imprisonment and whipping), physical sexual assault on a child (section 14, maximum 20 years imprisonment and whipping) and non-physical sexual assault of a child (section 15, maximum 20 years imprisonment, maximum RM20,000 fine or both).
Whether these Acts are still effective in this digitisation era is still debatable, especially when dealing with online predators outside Malaysia. It can be a difficult task to apprehend and prosecute them without good cooperation from other law enforcement agencies from respective countries and the Interpol.
Therefore, it is timely to revise them to accommodate the digitisation era and allow this legislation to take effect cross border regardless where these cyber criminals are operating whether locally or internationally.
The Star Online in October published an exclusive story related to women and child exploitation in Malaysia which is worth reading.
According to ACP Siti Kamsiah from Bukit Aman Sexual, Women and Child Investigations Division (D11), many of the suspects arrested claimed that they did not know it is an offence keeping and viewing child pornography materials in their private
space. To them, they did not engage in physical contact with the child, so they do not see it as a crime.
Also, she added that it is an offence to produce, share, exchange, buy, sell, possess, or access pornographic material online and offline.
In response to the increasing number of sexual predators targeting children online, a special D11 taskforce was established in 2018 with the technological know-how. The taskforce works closely with Interpol and police overseas to identify and track users and syndicates operating across borders.
From January to September this year, the police recorded 31 cases related to child sexual abuse content. Selangor (seven) and Kuala Lumpur (five) had the highest number of cases.
Nationwide, six cases involved producing child sexual abuse content, 13 cases involved distribution and 12 cases involved access to the material.
In Malaysia, a child is defined as persons below the age of 18 and is protected by the Child Act 2001 and the Sexual Offences Against Children Act 2017. The term “child pornography” in the Sexual Offences Against Children Act 2017 refers to visual, audio and/or written representation of a child engaged in sexually explicit content.
Using a case study from a neighbouring country, Brunei introduced Child Online Protection National Strategy Framework in the year 2015.
The framework involves parties from the Ministry of Communication and medical and education sectors joining hands together to protect and advocate online child safety and protection.
The framework mandates right organisational structure to be in place at a national level to facilitate and roll out of internet safety initiatives. Capacity building is required to raise the awareness in the community as suggested in the second section of this framework.
The third section of the framework focuses on strengthening countries’ legal measures.
The fourth section is the international law enforcement cooperation which is essential in curbing the internet child abuse given the global nature of the offending behaviour plus the cross boundary online predators.
The fifth section is technical and procedural measures which is working with the industry players where stakeholders have a key role to play to develop effective controls and solutions for end users.
Another case study to emulate is Australia. The Australian government has introduced the eSafety Commissioner as a legal institution under the Australian legislation, to foster online safety.
The eSafety Commissioner was established as an independent statutory office under the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015.
Initially, these functions were primarily related to enhancing online safety for Australian children. In 2017, the Act was amended to expand the commissioner’s remit to promoting and enhancing online safety for all Australians.
The Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015 gives the commissioner the power to probe and act on complaints about serious cyberbullying and offensive material targeted at Australian children.
In addition, the commissioner has powers to issue notices to individuals who post cyberbullying or offensive material and request them to take down those material, refrain from posting further or apologise to the child.
Additionally, the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015 establishes a civil penalties scheme that allows the commissioner to help with the removal of intimate images or videos from online platforms. In some cases, the commissioner may also be able to act against the person responsible for the image-based abuse.
The scheme gives eSafety Commissioner the power to give enforceable removal notices to social media services, websites, hosting providers and perpetrators, requiring the removal of intimate material.
The eSafety Commissioner is an independent statutory office supported by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
Coming back to Malaysia, none of these exemplary efforts from the cited case studies presented have been implemented. Thus, we should step forward in influencing our government for a similar measure to protect our children online, if not better.
A similar special commissioner functions can be set up under the relevant ministry, to enable a public-private-communities partnerships with a participative governance model to be considered.
This initiative can be enabled effectively through an interactive and informative digital platform such as the E-Security and Privacy Channel (ESPC) proposed by Serba Dinamik. We should continue to voice our concerns until they reach the right ears.
To end this discussion, let us ask ourselves this question again: Are we doing enough to protect our children online in Malaysia?
Assoc Prof Col (r) Datuk Dr Husin Jazri CISSP is Senior Vice President Cybersecurity, Serba Dinamik Group Berhad and Chief Editor of ESPC.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the New Sarawak Tribune.
