MAP Forum

Hyderabad: The Cyberabad SHE teams conducted 128 decoy operations and caught 79 persons red-handed while indulging in indecent acts at public places. Petty cases booked in 79 cases and counselled the remaining persons. The SHE teams also received 18 complaints from women victims through various modes.

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As part of preventive and awareness measures from November 15 to 21, the AHTU and SHE teams conducted awareness programs across various locations in Cyberabad and around 286 members participated, who were given awareness on human and child trafficking, eve teasing, social media harassment, child marriages, child rights, child labour, stalking, begging, cyber bullying, cyber frauds etc apart from women help line 181, Child help line 1098, Dial 100 importance, Crimes 1930 and others topics etc

Sussex police and crime commissioner Katy Bourne was shocked to hear that boys as young as 11 were sharing indecent images.

At a performance and accountability meeting with senior Sussex Police officers, she was equally shocked to hear from Assistant Chief Constable Rosie Ross that 13 to 16-year-old white boys were a concern when it came to “contact” sexual offences.

After the entities, the Brcko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has also adopted the Law on the Registry of Persons Convicted of Sexual Abuse of Children. The new regulation brings stricter control of perpetrators and is an important step in the protection of minors.

Brcko has harmonized its legislation with the rest of BiH and is introducing a registry of persons who have been finally convicted of sexual abuse and exploitation of children. The law clearly defines which acts enter the registry, and the emphasis is on the protection of children as a particularly vulnerable category. The regulation prohibits any contact of convicted persons with minors.

A proposal by the Council of the European Union on chat monitoring, aimed at preventing the distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), is now entering trilogue negotiations between the Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. The draft drops the earlier plan for mandatory surveillance. Instead, messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal would be allowed to voluntarily install software for automated chat monitoring, and the scope of such monitoring could even be expanded. Mandatory measures are to be reconsidered in the future. The proposal also seeks to make it easier for users to report chats suspected of involving CSAM and introduces mandatory age verification for users. Carmela Troncoso, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, is among the authors of a commentary welcoming the removal of the mandatory chat monitoring requirement. However, the signatories warn that several elements of the current proposal do little to help combat the spread of CSAM and could have unwanted side effects. In this interview, Carmela Troncoso discusses how the current draft differs from earlier ones, the implications of voluntary monitoring, the risks involved, and possible alternative approaches.

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), along with the School Education Department, held a State-level conference on key child right issues with a focus on education, health, the Juvenile Justice Act and the POCSO Act here on Monday.

NCPCR Member Secretary Sanjeev Sharma, in his address, stressed the urgent need for addressing children’s mental health, and said schools must play a central role in tackling rising psychological challenges.

Child-rights violations are not just statistical points but narratives that affect individual lives and the future of the nation, he said. He explained NCPCR’s commitment to strengthening institutional capacity through workshops and training, and revealed that in the last six months, it disposed of over 26,000 cases, rescued approximately 2,800 children and repatriated around 1,800 to child care institutions in their home districts.

The Council has reached a position on the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation after years of difficult negotiations, meaning that talks with Parliament can finally start.

The file, which includes measures aimed at combating the spread of online child sexual abuse material (CSAM), stalled after privacy and security experts raised concerns.

The original Commission proposal would have given law enforcement authorities a right to ask tech companies to scan their services for CSAM and grooming activity under mandatory detection orders.

A former employee of Meta, the owner of social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, testified as part of a major lawsuit that the tech company had a policy allowing 17 strikes before it suspended accounts engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex.”

Vaishnavi Jayakumar, former head of safety and well-being for Instagram, also testified that in March 2020, Meta did not have a specific way for people to report child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on Instagram, according to federal court documents filed Friday, Nov. 21, in the Northern District of California.

"It was very surprising to me,” Jayakumar said, adding that she tried to raise this issue “multiple times,” but was told it would require too much work to build.

Jayakumar's concerns heightened when she learned of what she called the "17x" policy at Meta.

Children in every community in this country are regularly being sexually exploited online with new and more extreme measures used to control, degrade and torture them, Lauren Coffren, an executive director with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) testified on Capitol Hill this week.

At Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Protecting our Children Online from Evolving Predators,” Coffren shared insights into three of the most egregious ways we’ve ever seen being used to exploit children as young as 12: financial sextortion, sadistic exploitation and generative artificial intelligence (GAI).