A 64-year old man posed himself as a
teenage boy and contacted girls through various chatrooms. The man constructed
a database of over 70 underage girls, profiling them according to various personal
and intimate details, and corresponded with these girls through emails and
mobile phones. He was later arrested in 2003 for attempting to kidnap an underage
girl and the authorities described him as “very dangerous and very organized”. Another
57-year old father of two was jailed for grooming children online for sex,
blackmailing and possessing indecent images of children. A more recent case of
a 47-year old man who posed as a teenage girl on a social network site, met and
raped a 12-year old girl.
There are many of such online child grooming
cases on the rise in the last 10 years. An article published on BBC News
stated that internet child grooming is increasing as an “alarming new trend”. Child
grooming refers to a calculated and deliberate behaviour of an offender with
intentions to secure a child’s trust and cooperation, such as befriending and
forming an emotional connection with the child, prior to engaging sexual
conducts with the child. The facts from the Australian Institute of Criminology
(AIC)’s report on online child grooming in 2009 reminds us about the dangers of social
networking, the vulnerability of children becoming easy targets and that online
psychopaths use this as a tool to obtain their targets more conveniently than
their old conventional ways.
The laws that protect us:
In the verge to protect children on
the internet, Australia, Canada, UK and US have legislations on online child
grooming offences. UK’s Section 15 of the Sexual OffencesAct 2003 addresses the issue of child grooming where it becomes an offense
when a person communicates and sets up a meeting with a child, either for
himself or for another person, with intentions of sexually abusing the child.
The meeting itself is an offense. Australia and Canada also have criminal codes
that prohibit communicating via online with underage children, with the
intentions of indecent matters related to grooming. In the US, some states have
additional laws clearly making seducing children online as a felony on top of
their federal laws.
Apart from Section 233 of the MalaysianCommunications and Multimedia Act 1998 that prohibits provision and distribution of offensive, indecent,
obscene or menacing contents online related to child pornography, Malaysia has
yet to set up regulations to curb online child grooming directly (besides the
Child Act 2001). Perhaps the government is looking into extending these laws. Meanwhile,
it is critical that parents and adults protect the children as much as possible
from these criminals hiding behind their computers, for even laws may not have the
power to prevent crimes for happening, as the saying goes “prevention is better
than cure”.
Note: No names of offenders will be
mentioned in this blog as such offenders should not be publicized and further popularizing
them, which could act as an encouragement for other potential offenders who
seek fame and publicity to act on their criminal intentions.
Sources:
BBC News, 9 October 2003;
BBC News,6 November 2012; BBC News, 14November 2012; BBC News, 4February 2013 ; AIC report on Online Child Grooming, 2009
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