[IMC-Editorial] [India Thinkers Net] FREEDOM OF ABUSE

[India Thinkers Net at Zinester.com]

The Telegraph, September 29, 2003

FREEDOM OF ABUSE

The internet has given a bizarre twist to the 
story of human freedom. There seems to be no 
secure line between the thrill of limitless 
possibilities and the frightening sense of things 
getting out of hand. What emerges is an 
impossible tangle of ethical, legal and political 
issues. Microsoft Network will soon be shutting 
down its free chatrooms for users in the United 
Kingdom, Europe, South America and parts of Asia, 
including India. This is the first time that a 
transnational service provider will deliberately 
draw in the worldwide web. The reason given for 
this is fundamentally moral, although it has been 
noted that MSN makes very little money from its 
international chatrooms anyway. But the problem 
will have to be addressed squarely. Nothing less 
than the sexual abuse of minors is the issue 
here. Lurking in these chatrooms are dangerous 
people, who are part of a vast, global network of 
criminals, the almost unmanageable spread of 
which is now being gradually revealed. Policing 
this limitless cyberworld of slippery identities 
and virtual anonymity is proving to be expensive 
for service providers and daunting for lawkeepers 
all over the world. Sexual crime and terrorism 
are two very different phenomena, but they 
operate within the same technological 
infrastructure, and pose similar practical and 
ethical problems of security.

Yet organized paedophilia confronts the 
libertarian with a difficult moral absolute. Any 
notion of total freedom will therefore have to be 
carefully reconsidered, but keeping in mind the 
pitfalls of such policing. This will always be 
difficult to achieve, and sustaining it can, and 
should, never be solely the task of the state. In 
India the problem is double-edged. On the one 
hand, child sexual abuse remains a largely 
invisible phenomenon, and there is no reason to 
assume that it is any less widespread than in 
Europe. So awareness and prevention will have to 
be stepped up relentlessly. On the other hand, 
the Indian state's attitude to moral policing is 
far from reassuring. Censorship - moral, cultural 
and political - has often taken, and continues to 
take, highly regressive forms in the hands of the 
Centre. The government censors documentary films, 
shuts down politically dissenting cybergroups, 
intervenes regularly in sexual health programmes 
and continues to regard homosexuals as criminals. 
This is certainly not the best profile for the 
ideal censor. The policing and censorship of 
something as pervasive as the internet should 
face, uncompromisingly, their toughest 
challenges. But they should also remain firmly 
within the public domain of discussion and debate 
in the Indian democracy.


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