M A I N   N E W S

Minors taking to cybersex
From Raman Mohan

HISAR, Dec 7 — Haryanvi adolescents have taken to voice-chat sex in a big way, posing serious problems for their parents many of whom now regret having jumped on to the Internet bandwagon.

The craze for this avatar of cybersex has spread like a virus over the past few months, thanks to the mushrooming of cybercafes, especially in Haryana towns around Delhi where connectivity is good and bandwidth much better than many of the smaller towns. However, undeterred by the connectivity problems, adolescents are spending hours at cybercafes and their home PCs for the obvious.

Inquiries reveal that instead of pornographic Web sites, adolescents are falling for adult voice-chat groups. What has made the voice-enabled chat rooms popular over the past few months is the new technology, which has made voice transmission on the Net crystal clear and sharp.

Cybercafe owners say most pornographic sites require you to pay through credit cards for joining the site as a member. Even those sites, which offer free membership, require surfers to give their credit card numbers to prove that they are above 18 years of age. In contrast, voice-chat sites do not require you to prove your age.

Another reason is that unlike pornographic sites, children can hear the goings-on in voice-chat rooms on their headphones with the site screen minimised or running in the background, thus fooling any Peeping Toms in cafes or parents at home.

This correspondent spoke to one of the room admins (a kind of anchor who moderates chat in a room) of a popular voice-chat Web site about the steps they take to eliminate minors from the rooms.

Another admin said their site provided several ways to moderate text chat through inbuilt word filters through which a surfer could have offensive text blacked out automatically. However, this facility was not yet available for voice-chat. But he said text chat was monitored and all efforts were made to keep the screens “sane”.

Nevertheless, the problem with most Haryanvi parents is that they are not computer literate and, thus, cannot use parental locking facilities. Mr S. K. Gupta (not his real name) said:” I learnt of the tricks my teenaged son was playing on us when I overheard him talking to his friend about how to use these sites without his parents getting wind of it. But I do not even know how to switch the machine on. My wife cannot tell a computer from a TV. What do I do?”.