Fight back! Don’t Let Them Take Our Children!

News Update:

Cats are cuddly creatures that are surefire ploys used by would-be kidnappers as reported here about a failed attempt to snatch a two-year-old British boy from a restaurant in Spain just a month after Madeleine McCann went missing. The boy’s mum said a black man had staked out the kids from his van parked outside a restaurant. After photographing several families’ children, the man tried to lure the two-year-old into his van. The child was stroking the cat but was prevented from going with the man by an alert 11-year-old who had been following the case of Maddie.

Again, the point I am trying to make here is that the mass media plays an important role in creating public awareness about the problem of child abduction, discussing issues relating to this crime and educating the public on prevention. Duty calls for the Malaysian media. Will they rise up to the occasion? 

The Star reports here that MAS will hold an internal enquiry on the MAS pilot. Enough said! I welcome your visit to my humble blog but let’s please try to focus on finding ways to protect our children from being victims. There is a verse in the Bible which I think bears a good reminder: “Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone”.  

Cyber police in Malaysia are trained to investigate mostly white collar crime as this report here by Supt Lim Hong Shuan says, and we are doing good says this report here. A very interesting legalistic discourse on “Freedom of Expression on the Internet” here with arguments from those who do not want to censor the internet but I have yet to find info on Royal Malaysian Police efforts to track down internet smut.  

Tehsin is fuming (at IGP in particular)  and justifiably so. Although I have vehemently proclaimed my staunchly apolitical stand, this time I just give up lah!!! While searching for reports on cyber police, I found out that in other countries the cyber sleuths are busy tracking down porn peddlars. (India here, here, Australia here, China here, here, here, US here and UK here) And guess what we have? This Bernama report here on UMNO Youth’s call on the Government to form a cyber police unit to maintain surveillance over the activities of bloggers!  I’d laugh at the sheer stupidity if I wasn’t as angry as Tehsin. WTF are they talking about?

It seems this episode with the MAS pilot has brought to light some grevious shortcomings in the system and in society that may be linked in some inexplicable way to increased reports of missing children and abduction attempts. Although for many of us who have long avoided confronting these despicable issues, like me, there comes a time when we have to face the facts staring in our faces, there are predators out there who prey on young children! What are we to do when confronted with issues like child porn sent to you unsolicited by email? Throw up our hands in horror and plead ignorance? Well, you now know what happened to that MAS pilot right?

They don’t do that in Canada apparently, as the Computer Crime Research Centre has launched an ”Online Fight Against Child Porn” as reported here. I wonder if we have such a programme in Malaysia?:

Cybertip.ca, an Internet child porn tipline, was launched nationally Monday. It analyzes tips from the public about potentially illegal material and activities on the Internet, referring them to law enforcement agencies. There is a link to Cybertip.ca on the York Regional Police website at www.police.york.on.ca and child abuse unit Det. Rob Thomson said it will be a valuable tool. “If someone gets a spam e-mail advertising a child porn site sent to them, they can go to our website and there’s a link to Cybertips where they can report it. But if there are images of child pornography on the e-mail we can also send an officer out to the house to investigate,” he said. There are two officers to follow up on tips and go online to investigate Internet luring. Plans are in place to add a third. Cybertip.ca began as a pilot project in Manitoba in 2002 and has received more than 2,000 reports of child sexual exploitation since its inception.

Also, a Toronto police detective Paul Gillespie proposed to Microsoft to come up with a better way to catch criminals who trafficked in child pornography here. Does the Royal Malaysian Police have this software?:

….Microsoft Canada software engineers worked with Gillespie, the Toronto Police Service Sex Crimes Unit, and other law enforcement agencies to understand how child pornographers were taking advantage of the openness and anonymity of the Internet. With that information in hand, the engineers then created a tool to help law enforcement officers apprehend pornographers. The result: the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS), built on Microsoft technology, was unveiled in April 2005. CETS helped law enforcement agencies follow hundreds of suspects at a time and eliminate duplicated work, making it much easier for them to follow up on leads, collect evidence, and build cases against suspected child pornographers…

…..CETS has grown from a Canadian law enforcement tool to one that is now global in scale. In April 2006, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), which works across the United Kingdom, made CETS part of its enforcement arsenal. The results were immediate. By October 2006, CETS was credited with helping police in the United Kingdom arrest 37 suspects and rescue five children. “In the past, police officers simply didn’t understand the Internet — it was a labyrinth to them,” Jim Gamble, chief executive officer of CEOP, told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). “But now we are upstream of [online pedophiles] and awaiting their next move.” Since then, the international momentum of CETS has increased tremendously. Law enforcement officials in Indonesia, Italy, and Brazil put the tool to work in 2006. And 13 other countries, among them Spain and Chile, are assessing the effectiveness of CETS and may deploy it soon….

Read this speech by INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald K. Noble here entitled ”The fight against sexual exploitation of children via the Internet” presented at the Paris Meeting on Missing and Sexually Exploited Children on 17 January 2007. The same meeting where the French First Lady talked about the Amber Alert system in France. An excerpt:

INTERPOL and its 186 member countries have identified three areas that ought to be of particular concern to all of us.

1. The Internet presents a danger to children via chat-rooms where grown-ups engage in conversations with them in an attempt to ‘groom’ or get them ‘ready’ for subsequent sexual conduct, abuse or exploitation by procuring sexually explicit images of them or by facilitating meetings where physical abuse could occur.
2. The Internet permits child predators and paedophiles to view, purchase, sell or exchange images, films or videos depicting the explicit sexual abuse of children.
3. An emerging trend is where the Internet offers deceptive and disguised websites, such as ‘young model sites,’ where young girls are shown clothed and are presented as child models, but where in fact once you enter the site you can obtain explicit images of children being sexually abused or you can obtain access to the pictured girl herself so you can take your own photos or can physically abuse the girl yourself. I will come back to this disturbing development in a few minutes.

 His heartrending speech delivered this powerful message on sites that exploit children: 

….What is even more disturbing is that sites like this one have been linked to organized crime. Where organized crime meets children under these circumstances, children become a disposable commodity.

 Read what the INTERPOL web page on “Crime Against Children” here has to say. So what say our IGP?:

Children are the most vulnerable individuals in our society; they are also the most precious commodity that the world has and have a right to be protected from all forms of abuse. INTERPOL as an organization is also committed to eradicating the sexual abuse of children and has passed several resolutions making crimes against children one of International policing top priorities.