1 in 2 schoolkids stalked online

Dwaipayan Ghosh | TNN | Nov 6, 2016, KOLKATA: Krishna Sekhar alias Kishan, 22, had recently bought an Apple iPhone and would walk out of conversations with his parents just to stay hooked to internet. He was hardly interested in his family business (his father and elder brother are wholesale rice traders). He claimed he would develop an app of his own. But the second-year student ended up behind the bars with charges of cyber stalking and money extortion slapped against him.
However, Kishan is not the only stalker arrested this year. The cyber cell of Kolkata Police is swamped with online harassment and extortion complaints — there has been a whopping 255.8% rise in such cases in the state between 2011 and 2015. The figure for Kolkata is scarier. It shows a 933.3% jump during the same period. In the past six months, there has been a further 5% spurt.
"We hardly had three to five such online cases till about 2012. Now, there are about five such cases each month where students turned out to be either online victims or the abuser," said a detective department officer.
A recent survey by a private body — Uninor — that has been shared with CID has found that one out of two schoolkids were victims of cyber stalking in the country. The survey, which covered 10,500 children in 29 schools, also found that 30% of children who regularly accessed internet had experienced some kind of cyber harm, including cyber stalking, cyber bullying, hacking and defamation. Among them, just 34% spoke to their parents about their online activities.
"The smartphone revolution has left us burdened with cases of online trolling. In many cases, these are nothing less than character assassination and sexual abuse. Unlike the computer where you need to log in and log off, there is no concept of logging off from your mobile. With wireless file-sharing technologies easily accessible, your personal data can become public if you are careless about the way you handle your phone," explained an investigator.
But in many cases, not being selective also leads to trouble. For example, a 15-year-old girl from a reputable English-medium school was stalked online by a 21-year-old school dropout after a chance encounter with her. Days later, he posed as a girl and sent her a friendship invitation. Soon after the friendship request was accepted, he put pressure on her for a meeting, threatening he would otherwise leak her morphed pictures on porn sites. He was arrested after a six-month probe.
K John Vijay Sagar, an associate professor of the department of child and adolescent psychiatry, NIMHANS, pointed out: "Of late, we have been witnessing a rising number of adolescents coming in with behavioural changes. When we go through their history over a period of time, we learn that it was owing to the overuse of social media and most of them were addicted to internet. This trend was not there earlier."
According to Supreme Court lawyer and cyber crime expert Pavan Duggal, six out of 10 people aren't aware of what constitutes a cyber crime. "As a result, they aren't reported. Neither the victims nor the abusers know what is an offence," he said.