Arifur Rahman Rabbi :
Police arrested three university students in Dhaka on October 15 last year for “creating and spreading child pornography” in collaboration with an international porno-maker ring.
Not only these three students, but also a group of people are found addicted and were allegedly sharing and storing child abuse materials in cyberspace as well as blackmailing young girls using those contents. Apart from it, cyber bullying was another threat.
Police have no specific information and statistics about those who capture sex scenes with children (child pornography) and spreading it on the cyberspace in Bangladesh.
However, police arrested another three along with a couple from Dhaka and Savar areas and got information about child pornography contents after collaborating with National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an organization based in the United States of America.
According to the 2019 data of NCMEC, an organization working on
various issues related to the rights of children, including the elimination of child sexual abuse and the elimination of child pornography, Bangladesh ranks fifth in the world in terms of engaging children with sex scenes, capturing images and videos of their sexual abuse.
According to NCMEC statistics in 2019, child pornography, sexual abuse images and videos were recorded and exchanged in India with a maximum of 19,87,430 incidents. The second-ranked Pakistan had 11,58,390, the third-ranked Iraq had 10,26,709, the fourth-ranked Algeria had 7,00,535 and fifth-ranked Bangladesh had 5,56,642.
Technology companies such as Google and Facebook, which are registered in the United States, have officially provided various information related to child sexual abuse on their networks to NCMEC. They take action by providing that information to law enforcement agencies in different countries.
The Criminal investigation Department (CID) of Bangladesh has been associated with the NCMEC since December last year.
The CID officials said that NCMEC would provide them training to get access to all necessary information, including the perpetrators’ cell phone numbers, IP address, ISP, Google account, names and types of devices, and even the longitude and latitude of the places from where the contents were uploaded on the internet.
Md Rezaul Masud, Special Superintendent of Police (SSP) of CID’s Cyber Crime Investigation and Operations Division, told The New Nation yesterday that NCMEC has been giving them a lot of information since joining.
“We sort them out. Some of them are intelligent, some are precautionary, some are direct child abuse. We sort them out and take action.”
Based on the information received from the agency, several raids have been carried out, he added.
The CID police sources said that NCEMC provided more than 23,000 contents in last three months where 95% were asked in Facebook. The CID arrested three including a couple after get information from NCMEC.
Police said that the couple, husband sexually abused wife’s niece when she was sleeping and wife then recorded the scene in the video. They were arrested from Savar area.
Around one and half years ago a man visited his sister’s house in Barisal and sexually abused her daughter child. Recently, NCMEC gave the information about the matter and following that police arrested the youth from Dhaka’s Banani area on January 12, said police.
SSP Rezaul said that when we went to investigate, we saw that in most cases of harassment of girls and boys are occurring by the close relatives. As a result, many families do not want to file any complain even after they are arrested.
He said they have a lot of information. They are also preparing for some more raids.
Meanwhile, Save the children in a report titled “Mapping of psychosocial support for girls and boys affected by child sexual abuse in four countries in South and Central Asia” said that child sexual abuse has been addressed in Bangladesh since the early 1990s. Bangladesh is home to an estimated 6.3 million working children.
20,000-30,000 children living on the streets, and 10,000 boys and girls engaged in sex work in capital city. The visible location of commercial forms of child sexual abuse accounts for much of government and non-government response.
A study carried out during the late 1990s in Dhaka brothel areas found that 405 of approximately 3,000 sampled commercial sex workers were less than 18 years of age. The same study reported that in a sample of 92 child prostitutes, the average age of entry was 13.5 years, said the report.
Abdullah Al Mamun, director of Child Protection and Child Rights Governance at Save the Children Bangladesh, told the New Nation that adult and teenagers are getting addicted to child pornography due to effortless digital access and the absence of monitoring. Family monitoring, vigilance on ‘dark web’ and accommodating digital literacy in study materials at educational institutions are essential.
According to the Bangladesh Shishu Adhikar Forum (BSAF) there have been 324 children victims of rape from January to August 2020. In the period, 11 disabled children became victim of rape while 49 were gang raped. 17 children died after rape and 104 were victim of sexual harassment.
BSAF’s Director Abdus Shahid Mahmood told The New Nation that it is difficult to turn off mobile phone or internet. But its proper use must be ensured. But that is not happening.
Now internet data is being used freely after smart mobile phones available in people hand. Seeing pornography there, various kinds of ugly attitudes are being created in people’s minds, he added.
The regulatory body needs to work hard to stop pornography on the Internet. Law enforcement needs to increase surveillance in the internet world. The law must be strictly enforced in this regard, he further added.
IT expert Tanveer Hassan Zoha told The New Nation yesterday that the authority concerned has taken any strong step to stop such content. But still they can’t stop it. The question then is whether they are capable of stopping them at all.
The exchange of information can be a temporary relief. But that is not possible in the long run. So, the authority must close the national gateway of such sites. In addition, there are alternative gateways that also need to be closed. Then it can be prevented, he said.
Police arrested three university students in Dhaka on October 15 last year for “creating and spreading child pornography” in collaboration with an international porno-maker ring.
Not only these three students, but also a group of people are found addicted and were allegedly sharing and storing child abuse materials in cyberspace as well as blackmailing young girls using those contents. Apart from it, cyber bullying was another threat.
Police have no specific information and statistics about those who capture sex scenes with children (child pornography) and spreading it on the cyberspace in Bangladesh.
However, police arrested another three along with a couple from Dhaka and Savar areas and got information about child pornography contents after collaborating with National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an organization based in the United States of America.
According to the 2019 data of NCMEC, an organization working on
various issues related to the rights of children, including the elimination of child sexual abuse and the elimination of child pornography, Bangladesh ranks fifth in the world in terms of engaging children with sex scenes, capturing images and videos of their sexual abuse.
According to NCMEC statistics in 2019, child pornography, sexual abuse images and videos were recorded and exchanged in India with a maximum of 19,87,430 incidents. The second-ranked Pakistan had 11,58,390, the third-ranked Iraq had 10,26,709, the fourth-ranked Algeria had 7,00,535 and fifth-ranked Bangladesh had 5,56,642.
Technology companies such as Google and Facebook, which are registered in the United States, have officially provided various information related to child sexual abuse on their networks to NCMEC. They take action by providing that information to law enforcement agencies in different countries.
The Criminal investigation Department (CID) of Bangladesh has been associated with the NCMEC since December last year.
The CID officials said that NCMEC would provide them training to get access to all necessary information, including the perpetrators’ cell phone numbers, IP address, ISP, Google account, names and types of devices, and even the longitude and latitude of the places from where the contents were uploaded on the internet.
Md Rezaul Masud, Special Superintendent of Police (SSP) of CID’s Cyber Crime Investigation and Operations Division, told The New Nation yesterday that NCMEC has been giving them a lot of information since joining.
“We sort them out. Some of them are intelligent, some are precautionary, some are direct child abuse. We sort them out and take action.”
Based on the information received from the agency, several raids have been carried out, he added.
The CID police sources said that NCEMC provided more than 23,000 contents in last three months where 95% were asked in Facebook. The CID arrested three including a couple after get information from NCMEC.
Police said that the couple, husband sexually abused wife’s niece when she was sleeping and wife then recorded the scene in the video. They were arrested from Savar area.
Around one and half years ago a man visited his sister’s house in Barisal and sexually abused her daughter child. Recently, NCMEC gave the information about the matter and following that police arrested the youth from Dhaka’s Banani area on January 12, said police.
SSP Rezaul said that when we went to investigate, we saw that in most cases of harassment of girls and boys are occurring by the close relatives. As a result, many families do not want to file any complain even after they are arrested.
He said they have a lot of information. They are also preparing for some more raids.
Meanwhile, Save the children in a report titled “Mapping of psychosocial support for girls and boys affected by child sexual abuse in four countries in South and Central Asia” said that child sexual abuse has been addressed in Bangladesh since the early 1990s. Bangladesh is home to an estimated 6.3 million working children.
20,000-30,000 children living on the streets, and 10,000 boys and girls engaged in sex work in capital city. The visible location of commercial forms of child sexual abuse accounts for much of government and non-government response.
A study carried out during the late 1990s in Dhaka brothel areas found that 405 of approximately 3,000 sampled commercial sex workers were less than 18 years of age. The same study reported that in a sample of 92 child prostitutes, the average age of entry was 13.5 years, said the report.
Abdullah Al Mamun, director of Child Protection and Child Rights Governance at Save the Children Bangladesh, told the New Nation that adult and teenagers are getting addicted to child pornography due to effortless digital access and the absence of monitoring. Family monitoring, vigilance on ‘dark web’ and accommodating digital literacy in study materials at educational institutions are essential.
According to the Bangladesh Shishu Adhikar Forum (BSAF) there have been 324 children victims of rape from January to August 2020. In the period, 11 disabled children became victim of rape while 49 were gang raped. 17 children died after rape and 104 were victim of sexual harassment.
BSAF’s Director Abdus Shahid Mahmood told The New Nation that it is difficult to turn off mobile phone or internet. But its proper use must be ensured. But that is not happening.
Now internet data is being used freely after smart mobile phones available in people hand. Seeing pornography there, various kinds of ugly attitudes are being created in people’s minds, he added.
The regulatory body needs to work hard to stop pornography on the Internet. Law enforcement needs to increase surveillance in the internet world. The law must be strictly enforced in this regard, he further added.
IT expert Tanveer Hassan Zoha told The New Nation yesterday that the authority concerned has taken any strong step to stop such content. But still they can’t stop it. The question then is whether they are capable of stopping them at all.
The exchange of information can be a temporary relief. But that is not possible in the long run. So, the authority must close the national gateway of such sites. In addition, there are alternative gateways that also need to be closed. Then it can be prevented, he said.
