Do you know what your children are doing online?

It was during a quarrel with a female neighbour that Adline Mwikali found out her teenage sister was secretly chatting with a man online.

"You think I'm a bad influence on your sister? Your girl is corrupting my children! She has a mobile phone and she is flirting with men!" the woman shouted at Mwikali in anger.

At the time, Mwikali worked in a restaurant at the Coast. During school holidays, her younger sister would go live with her instead of going to their rural village in Machakos county. Mwikali confronted her sister about the neighbour's revelations. The girl confessed that indeed she owned a smartphone, which a man had bought for her.

Social media is part of our lives. It helps us stay connected with family and friends. Lots of people are promoting their businesses through social media, which has helped them get more customers and thus grow their incomes. As with everything else, bad elements are giving social media a bad name.

Like hyenas in the bush, thieves, perverts and swindlers roam the Internet, looking for victims to be exploited. Children as young as 10 are vulnerable to predators, some of whom pretend to be fellow children.

DRIVEN TO SUICIDE

Jane Meta, an American woman, has narrated how extortionists on the TikTok video sharing platform drove her 14-year-old niece to commit suicide. The teenager was targeted by a paedophile ring, which manipulated her into making and sending explicit videos of herself. The content would then be circulated online.

The girl's parents did not know what she was doing until the day detectives knocked at their door, seeking a statement from their daughter. "The threat is real and, according to the government agents who took my niece's statement, far more common than anyone wants to admit, and it's a growing problem," Jane Meta said on June 8.

The guilt and shame from the investigation were too much for the teenager. She took her own life despite receiving therapy. Parents monitoring their children's mobile phones might not notice anything wrong because perverts disguise themselves as children. They can even infiltrate protected group chats.

"Get your kids off of TikTok and Instagram. Do not let your daughters (or sons) post provocative photos just because everyone else is doing it," Meta warns. "If you give your kids free access to social media, you do not know who they are talking to."

Jane Meta's story emerged at the same time social media platforms were accused of making it easy to share sexually explicit content involving children. An investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) found large networks of accounts that appear to be operated by minors, which are openly advertising self-generated child sexual abuse material for sale.

"Instagram is currently the most important platform for these networks, with features like recommendation algorithms and direct messaging that help connect buyers and sellers," the observatory notes. Instagram's popularity and user-friendly interface make it a preferred option for these activities. Other social media platforms, such as Twitter and Telegram, were criticised for not doing enough to crack down on the vice.

In response to the allegations, Instagram says it has destroyed 27 paedophile networks over the past two years. In January alone, almost half a million accounts violating child safety policies were removed from the platform.

Kenya, too, has been infiltrated by paedophile networks. In March 2022, a 21-year-old woman in Mombasa was sentenced to life imprisonment for making child pornography for sale to online buyers. Edda Wakesho committed the acts while working as a house help.

In her defence, Wakesho admitted to joining the online syndicate because she needed money. She was put under pressure by the syndicate to include children in her vile acts. That's how she picked on her employer's four-year-old son.

As the saying goes, there's no honour among thieves. Wakesho was exposed when the syndicate shared her videos with the boy's mother. Police told the court there exists a large racket that recruits house helps to take explicit pictures of children.

A 2021 report by the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children shows that, on average, 9 per cent of child Internet users in Kenya have experienced unwanted requests for images showing their private parts. The children are enticed with gifts or threatened to engage in online sexual activities.

Interestingly, most of the perpetrators demanding such images were other children, but there were reported cases of adult offenders. According to the Global Partnership, the most common social media platforms used in Kenya to exchange explicit images of children were Facebook and WhatsApp.

WHAT TO DO

To mitigate the problem, the Partnership advises caregivers and duty-bearers to monitor what their children are doing both online and offline. Most importantly, caregivers should be extra vigilant about the people their children or the children in their community interact with.

"Around half of the caregivers of Internet-using children in Kenya have never used the Internet themselves," the report discloses. "Being involved and supportive of a child's Internet use will help them [caregivers] understand the risk and benefits of being online."

Children should be informed about their right to be protected from all forms of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Children should be taught how to stay safe by setting boundaries, recognising appropriate and inappropriate behaviour from those around them and how to say no to inappropriate behaviour.

The End Violence Partnership states that between 2017 and 2019, Kenyan law enforcement authorities received an average of 13,572 CyberTips per year. Almost all of those reports were about the possession, production and distribution of explicit material involving children. In 2020, the number of CyberTips rose to 14,434. The tips came from popular social media platforms through the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

To address the growing threat to children, the Kenya government is implementing the National Plan of Action to Tackle Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (2022-26). The plan aims at guiding government, industry, policymakers, civil society organisations and communities to take the right measures to ensure the Internet is safe for children.

Among the challenges to be addressed in the plan is the inadequate regulation of cybercafes and video dens. The criminal justice system is to be guided on how to deal with cases in which the perpetrator is also a child. Difficulties arise in situations where adults use older children to gain access to younger ones so that the older children are unknowingly involved in illicit activities while being victims themselves.