The Rural police have advised parents and school teachers to check the multimedia content stored in the mobile phones of their wards and students.
The advisory comes in the wake of police raids in several Internet cafes in Balaramapuram on Thursday evening.
Deputy Superintendent of Police, Neyyatinkara, P. Gopakumar, said a considerable number of adolescents visited these Internet cafes to transfer pornographic clippings to their mobile phones. The café managements charged up to Rs.50 for the service. Pirated copies of newly released Malayalam, English, and Hindi movies were also sold thus. The police raided the cafés on the basis of a complaint from a parent. They arrested Sameer, 25, owner of an Internet café, on charge of disseminating pornographic material to adolescents, who in turn circulated the clips among their school friends.
The police said teachers should check the contents of laptop computers, digital recorders and pen drives students brought to school.
Seema Bhaskar, director of the Kerala Mahila Samakhya Society (KMSS), a women empowerment programme under the Union Ministry of Human Resources, said adolescent girls often struck relationships with strangers, sometimes with tragic effect, and it seemed mobile phones were their primary tool of communication with the outside world. The police said they had come across instances of sex offenders passing on pornographic content to teenage girls on the pretext of sharing songs.
The police said two suicides and two suicide attempts by girls of the same school, within two months, in the rural police district this year were illustrative of the ill effects of un-regulated use of mobile phones by teenagers.
The post-mortem examination of one of the victims, a 16-year-old, had showed that she had been sexually abused since the age of 14.
An examination of her mobile phone records revealed the girl had befriended an auto-rickshaw driver she had met on her way to school. The man had sexually exploited her by promising to marry her.
The police said sex offenders often collected the cell phone numbers of girl students from shops which sold mobile “recharge coupons”. They tried, sometimes successfully, to strike an acquaintance with their target over phone. If rejected, they often passed on the girl's number to their friends or advertised it on pornographic websites.
District Police Chief A. Akbar has ordered the formation of “Vanitha Jagrita Samathis” to protect adolescent girls in schools in the rural district. An official said the local Sub Inspector, office-bearers of parents and teachers associations, councillors, students' representatives and doctors would be on board the Samathis, which would impart self defence training and basic living skills to girl students.
