Online predators are technologically sophisticated, and know better than parents how vulnerable children are. The advent of new devices and apps has produced an arms race between predators and the police, while leaving parents closed out of online communities and unable to easily monitor the safety of their children.
In yesterday’s paper, one expert said that “the gap between adults and children is getting bigger” – and so it is. The proliferation of digital communities, and social spaces where anonymity is the default, means that the internet is a world of subcultures, with parents sometimes unable to understand what their children are getting up to. Many children grow up with an internet that allows them an almost limitless world of social communities, bringing them into contact with the avatars of people they know nothing about. The internet liberates, but its spaces are not always safe.
These worlds are hard to police in any sense. The private companies that operate them do not usually collect enough data to provide meaningful information to authorities about online harassment. Legal rules to describe and prohibit digital harassment are often years behind the edge of technological innovation, especially when law enforcement requires eye-straining application of pre-digital principles to events we only recently developed the language to describe. As with the long-documented problems inherent in rape prosecutions, judicial culture lags behind contemporary society, often significantly.
These are difficult problems. The UAE’s police forces may want to work with specialised policing task forces abroad to develop domestic capacities to tackle online predators.
The FNC is considering amendments to the cybercrime law: clear and specific legal guidelines on what constitutes online sexual predation, informed by current, international expertise on the matter, are needed to make sure the law keeps up with the predators.
