There have been some media reports that children are becoming victims of depression owing to cyber bullying. As per the survey report “Cyber Crime -2013 – Kids (India)”, published by the software company, Symantec about 18% of children have said that they have been victim of bullying on internet. It has been stated that the sample size of said survey is limited to 203 kids.
The Government has taken various steps in this regard which include:
i)Ministry of Home Affairs has issued an Advisory on Preventing & combating Cyber Crime against Children dated 4th Jan., 2012, wherein it was advised to States / Union Territories to specifically combat the crimes in the forms of cyber stalking, cyber bullying, child pornography and exposure to sexually explicit material etc.
ii)The Information Technology Act, 2000 has provision for dealing with cyber crimes targeting children.
iii)Government has implemented Information Security Education Awareness (ISEA) programme including the programs conducted by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Internet & Mobile Association of India (IMAI) and Data Security Council of India (DSCI) for security awareness and training in the area of information security. Specific workshops have been conducted for school children on making them aware about risks on internet and adopting safe internet browsing practices. In these programmes around 710 workshops have been organised across the country covering large no. of organisations, schools, students and teachers. During the workshops awareness kits have also been distributed. Security awareness material like posters, DVDs, cartoon/animation videos have also been developed and widely distributed. A dedicated website for information security awareness (www.infosecawareness.in) has also been developed and content is available in English and Hindi language.
iv)A website (secureyourpc.in) for children, home users and elderly is available for safeguarding their computer systems and learning the risks on internet. This information was given by the Minister or Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad in the Rajya Sabha today.