Malaysia tops in South-east Asia for online child pornography

Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia has the highest number of IP addresses which upload and download photographs and visuals of child pornography in South-east Asia, the authorities have said. The number of children falling prey to perpetrators who they befriend online is also reportedly increasing fast.

Many Malaysian parents let their children use handphones without monitoring them, and more than 60 per cent of children spend time in online chatrooms on the internet on a daily basis.

Data shows that close to 20,000 IP addresses in Malaysia upload and download photographs and visuals of child pornography, the highest number in South-east Asia.

The numbers were revealed by Malaysian Police’s Ong Chin Lan in a seminar on “Cyber Protection for Children”. According to Assistant Commissioner Ong, Dutch Police based in Malaysia in 2015 provided data that showed about 17,338 IP addresses involved in child pornography were from Malaysia. Ms Ong said data showed that prior to 2014, an average of 60 children a year were sexually assaulted by perpetrators whom they had befriended through the Internet.

The figure increased to 184 in 2015 and 183 in 2016. In 2017, the figure was 117, as of May 2017.

It is learnt that about 51 per cent of children aged between 13 and 15 befriended the perpetrators through the messaging

app WeChat. Other channels included Facebook, WhatsApp and Beetalk.

According to a survey by the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission of children between 10 and 17 in 2015, most, or 91.6 per cent, owned a handphone before the age of 15 while 88.5 per cent had Facebook or other social media accounts.

It also found that only 35.6 per cent of parents monitor their children’s activities.