Earlier we reported of youths being nabbed for circulating child pornography through WhatsApp. To crack down such rape and molestation videos, Maharashtra cyber police to launch an online portal within the next 15 days to register complaints of such graphic content.
The portal was an initiative by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, called Cyber Crime Prevention of Women and Child (CCPWC), has already done a test run in a few states. In the coming days it will be open for public use. Inspector General of Maharashtra cybercrime, Brijesh Singh said, “Our team has been working hard on this portal that we’d started on August 1 on a trial basis. It will focus on complaints related to sexual abuse of women and children. As of now, it would respond to complaints, but in the future, we would use technology to identify and remove such content. Within the next few days, we will open this to the public.”
The move is in response to a 2017 order by the Supreme Court (SC), under which the Central government had to set up an online portal and hotline to allow people to anonymously report offenders. After SC’s order, the Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi announced the government will develop an online ‘Central Reporting Mechanism’ dedicated to complaints regarding cyber crime against women and children.
Up until today the complainant had to register the case with the police, which would then be forwarded to the cyber crime branch which was facing a staff crunch. With this portal, anyone can lodge a complaint directly by mentioning all technical evidence, and the case will be taken care of.
An officer from the state cyber crime team who is working on the portal said, “Presently, the process goes through the police, who report the matter to the cyber cell. But through this portal, we’ll start getting complaints directly, and a special team dedicated for this portal will try to resolve the matter within 24 hours.”
Here’s how you can report the sexually explicit content circulating via social media. “So, the person just needs to upload the information and technical content on the portal, mentioning the complainant’s identity if possible, number, place and time of incident, and if they have any further details, they can add those too. These days, people just forward videos related to child and women sexual harassment on WhatsApp or Facebook, because of which, most of the time the identity of the victim gets revealed. But now, with the help of this portal, people can report the matter directly to cyber police,” the officer added.
The team will also monitor hashtags used by offenders to upload and search for this content, which will further be blocked.