Cyber education is the best tool against cybercrime?

NEW DELHI: A group of students hacked into a school's computer system and sent an email to all the parents a few years ago. The email asked the parents to gather at the school on a particular day with Rs 200 worth of sweets. The school authorities were in for a shock when these parents descended on the premises with boxes of barfi and ladoos.

This was an innocuous trick, but it can get dangerous sometimes, according to Supreme Court advocate and cyber law specialist Pavan Duggal. He was addressing teachers at the India International Centre for the 40th National Progressive Schools' Conference.

Duggal recounted another such incident when students slipped a bug into a teacher's bag and gained access to her private conversations. The question that suggested itself was whether teachers were actually aware of what was being written or talked about them. While few teachers answered in the affirmative, the question opened the floodgates for many niggling doubts. Teachers wondered how they could deal with caricatures and insulting comments in circulation, and what could prevent misuse of school networks by students. With a vast amount of content as well as technology becoming easily accessible, educational institutions and parents are confronted with serious issues related to cyber crimes and mischief.

These children have been born in the information age and take to new technologies. Their ability to access content, even objectionable, with relative ease, results in misuse. "Nine out of 10 children and most adults don't know that their actions are punishable under the law," said Duggal.

"It is imperative that children be counselled and informed about the legal ramifications of such actions. Cyber bullying, unwarranted comments, messages and electronic messages which are defamatory in nature — something as simple as calling somebody a fool — can land you in court," Duggal added. While explaining the law involving e-content to teachers, he said it was important to sensitize students to tools of cyber space.

This thought was echoed by Rajiv Chandran, national information officer of the United Nations, India and Bhutan, who said the biggest challenge today was managing hate speech. "The internet is the biggest propagator of hate messages and children and users are recipients of it," he added. Instead of misusing these tools, children need to taught how to use them properly. Chandran felt this was only possible by not "mentoring them" but by "engaging with them".

Finally, Chandran emphasized the need for helping children unlearn their prejudices as much as enabling them to learn new ideas."We all have biases when it comes to community, religion, food, smell, thoughts, ideas, etc. It is time you teach children to unlearn those biases," said Chandran. "As a teacher you are the first person to be aware of such groupism and community biases. You can break those biases... And this cannot be done by sitting on a high mountain of mentoring, but by listening and engaging with them," said Chandran.