Keeping young ones safe online

Visual images, though informative and important, are always difficult to include in resources that battle sexual abuse. In the book this sticky area is ingeniously side-stepped with comic illustrations by artist and practising lawyer Faizati Mohd Ali. Illutrations: Women's Centre for Change

From catfishing to cyberbullying, online grooming and blackmail, the internet today is a minefield for adolescents and children.

With the pandemic pushing children online at younger and younger ages, predators are finding increasingly innovative ways to seek out and prey on victims while they are still in the safety of their homes.

To combat this constantly changing new realm of child abuse, the Women’s Centre for Change (WCC) in Penang with the help of Dell Technologies has put out a new book this month entitled Cybersafety: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe Online (Guidebook for Teachers and Parents).

From looking at the many types of abuse children can experience while on the internet, the book goes deeper, pointing out red flags to spot ongoing online abuse as well as steps to handle disclosure by teens and children in the event that abuse has happened.

Penned by noted senior paediatrician Datuk Dr Amar Singh HSS, Cybersafety is aimed at becoming the latest resource in WCC’s decades-long fight to keep our young ones safe and thriving.

A never-ending cycle

Though on the rise, society often takes online sexual abuse more lightly than physical sexual abuse.

Victims are, at many times, still located within their homes and the abuse is conducted remotely, usually through webcams on phones, tabs or computers.

The perceived level of harm cyber abuse causes, however, could not be more underestimated.

“‘The internet never forgets’ is an oft quoted phrase that has much truth. Abuse that happens in-person, once ended, only lives in our memories.

“Online abuse ‘lives’ forever. Any online abuse, especially naked images of children, are hard to remove.

“Hence they serve as a memory or reminder to the child about the abuse – an ongoing abuse in the child’s life that cannot be erased,” says Dr Amar.

Stressing that online sexual abuse is just as harmful as ‘offline’ sexual abuse, Dr Amar explains that sheer scope of the internet exponentially multiplies the possible volume of abuse and number of abusers.

“Cyber abuse tends to be easily amplified and intensified as it reaches a larger audience, for example, more persons can abuse one child.

The unlimited scope of the internet means that the abuse can be viewed by many, amplifying the anguish the child experiences,” he says.

Both children and adults can fall victim to online abuse but the former are particularly vulnerable for several reasons.

Firstly, making friends and establishing relationships are quickly moving away from the traditional face-to-face meetings where children and parents have more control.

By being able to physically see and communicate with another person, Cybersafety states that the identity of the other in in-person meetings is generally not hidden and parents can play a larger protective role in controlling who their child or teenager interacts with.

The privacy and around-the-clock availability that online communication offers significantly limits the support and boundaries that guardians can give their children.

“With cyber abuse, there has been a rise in cases for both adults and children as societies have grown to embrace digital technologies; not just for entertainment but also for education and communication.

“The majority of children now are exposed to and gain access to digital devices and the internet from a very young age; much of this is unsupervised,” Dr Amar says.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of digital devices and the internet even further among children.

“It has become a necessity to have a digital connection for education. This means that many more children have had access to digital devices and the internet in the past one and a half years,” he adds.

At an age where they are still developing both mentally and physically, identifying suspicious characters and bad intentions may be beyond the experience of children, especially in an extensive realm like the internet.

“Children tend to have less limitations or barriers to exploring the internet.

“Adults may assume children have inbuilt safeguards to protect them when online but this is not true. We all have to learn these skills.

“It is best we learn them from a safe adult rather than through the experience and pain of abuse,” Dr Amar says.

The element of self-participation is also generally unique in online abuse where children are duped or coerced into performing harmful acts on themselves and are racked with guilt afterwards.

As noted in Cybersafety, online abuse can be confusing to children and teenagers when they have been groomed or blackmailed into doing harm to themselves whether it be taking off their clothes or performing sexual acts on themselves while the abuser watches.

“Unlike physical abuse, one very damaging aspect of online sexual abuse is that often pictures or videos are taken or shared.

If these are shared widely, the child or teenager can be re-victimised many times over.

“In a sense the memory of their shame is ‘immortalised’ online – a never-ending abuse.

“Any attempt at healing must deal, not just with the impact of the trauma on the abused, but also the pain that comes from ongoing distribution,” Dr Amar says in the book.

Illustrations and outreach

Visual images, though informative and important, are always difficult to include in resources that battle sexual abuse.

In Cybersafety, this sticky area is ingeniously side-stepped with comic illustrations by artist and practising lawyer Faizati Mohd Ali.

From masked individuals behind screens to victims being berated by emojis, Faizati’s drawings capture situations that are often difficult to put into words.

The illustrations also play an important role in the second half of WCC’s new book that details several 45-minute to 1-hour activities that can be conducted by teachers and parents to help educate children and teenagers on staying safe online.

WCC project officer Yeap Yen Ying says cybersafety outreach was the latest in the list of child abuse prevention initiatives by the Penang-based NGO.

“Prevention of sexual abuse for children has been the core of WCC outreach work.

“In 2000, we initiated the ‘Ok Tak Ok’ programme where we teach primary school children of ages 10 to 12 years about ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’ and educate them on how to tell someone should a bad touch happen.

“To sustain this program, WCC developed a training package – Bijak Itu Selamat (Be Smart, Be Safe) – and trained primary school teachers to run the ‘Ok Tak Ok’ programme for their respective school children,” Yeap says, adding that prior to the pandemic, 5,000 to 8,000 children benefited from this programme every year.

A decade later, WCC began working with emergency departments at Penang government hospitals to assist sexual assault and domestic violence victims and they discovered a disturbing trend – many in the former category were children, mainly teenage girls aged 15 to 17.

“When we saw this, we realised the need to expand and develop programmes for secondary children to equip them with greater awareness to not be sexually exploited.

WCC programmes for teenagers include: Respek (talking about healthy and non-exploitative relationships), Finding My Voice (specific for girls to build confidence and self-assertiveness), Boys Programme (specific for boys on male expectations of being macho, respectful and so on) and in 2016, Cybersafety (on online platform dangers),” Yeap added.

The Cybersafety programme – the precursor of the Cybersafety handbook – has gained traction in recent years as secondary school teachers find themselves trying to help teenage children face online issues.

In 2017, WCC produced three short videos and a simple resource booklet on the issue and later, conducted training workshops for teachers.“However, we found that teachers still had many challenges in helping students as they themselves still lack knowledge and the skills to understand an ever-changing technological world.

When the Covid-19 pandemic and Movement Control Order happened unexpectedly, WCC readapted and migrated our work online,” Yeap says.

To better battle the online abuse threat, WCC also further expanded their partnerships outside educational and government bodies.

A partnership with Dell Technologies beginning last year trained almost 100 volunteers from the Dell ‘Women in Action’ employee resource group while the corporation sponsored the publishing of the new, comprehensive Cybersafety handbook.

Now running the Ok Tak Ok and Cybersafety programmes online, WCC has extended their work nationwide, running these programmes remotely for schools and communities as far as Selangor, Kelantan and KL.

For now, while Covid-19 pushes more students online for prolonged periods and at younger ages, WCC is focusing much of their efforts in reaching as many educators and guardians as possible.

“The immediate goal would be to continue to conduct more cybersafety programmes for teenagers of the ages 13 to 17 nationwide.

With the continued pandemic, the Cybersafety programme has become more important and urgent as children are using online platforms for their education and socialisation and therefore, are at greater risk of sexual exploitation.

The longer term goal would be to conduct more training workshops for school counselors and educators nationwide, so that educators are able to sustain and run this programme at their own localities.

We hope to translate the new book into Bahasa Malaysia by next year if we get a sponsor,” Yeap says.

Cybersafety: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe Online (Guidebook for Teachers and Parents) is available free online at www.wccpenang.org/books. Hardcopies are available for RM15, which includes postage. For training requests and other information, email [e-mail].