Child predators and a message for parents - EDITORIAL

The late Anton Jones sang a song about ‘Podi Saman Kumara’. The lyrics of the song reveal that a child was abducted and there were demands for ransom. By the time the parents were making arrangements to raise the rupees one and half lakhs that was demanded the child had already been killed. (the songs penned for Jones are associated with real life incidents). The lyrics of the song further reveal that Sri Lankan children grow up in a country that offers a spiritual guidance; the lyrics also reminding listeners that Gautama Buddha visited Sri Lanka thrice. 

However incidents like what happened to Saman Kumara have continued over the years. Children in this country often make news either because they are killed, raped or molested. And what does the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) do on such occasions? It watches passively or works in lackadaisical manner and has attracted much criticism over the years. For the record the NCPA interdicted its former Deputy Chairman the late Sajeewa Samaranayake when he affirmed through a sworn affidavit to an Australian Court that ‘Sri Lanka has an unsafe environment for children and that the justice system as a whole didn’t respond effectively to cases of child abuse’. Now this is a very serious statement and another case of punishing the ‘messenger’. 

For the last few days newspapers have been buzzing with a child abuse incident following the sexual exploitation of a female, aged just 15 years. The child had been used for sexual activities and the child’s predators had come from different walks of life. This gives the clear message that child predators come from a wide ranging society and some of them can be from the family’s close circle. 

Schools, parents and guardians of children try to portray to the outside world that their offspring are growing up in a secure environment under the best of comfort and care. But there are occasions when these so-called secure environments have in them predators who are waiting in hiding to strike. Most child abuse incidents go unreported because the victims are too shocked or are too embarrassed to reveal the ordeal. 
Critics point out that there are enough laws protecting the interests of children. One law that we quite often refer to is the ‘1995 Penal Code Amendment’ that includes clauses on how to deal with pedophiles abuse, statutory rape etc. But how much of these laws are implemented remains a question. 

We need working parents to be more vigilant of the dangers that their school going children can be exposed to. They have to be more alert to as to who their children communicate with in the cyber world. They must remember that the cyber world is much more exciting and tempting than the real world. The baits used by child predators in most incidents are love and time; two things that most working parents fail miserably to offer when demands are made by children. 

Your child often keeps a window to his or her life open in a subtle way which may show that everything isn’t okay. You need to be hawkeyed to this information because that’s the way you can save your child from this scary world of ‘child predators’.