There are those cute school pictures of our children graduating from nursery – complete with graduation gowns and caps – that are then put on the school website. Then there are the ones parents post on Facebook of their children eating ice cream during a family outing. What are the chances they would end up on one of those paedophile websites? Plenty of chances, according to many studies, which warn of online child pornography. One newspaper analysis I came across aggregates these studies and notes how paedophiles [repost] seemingly innocent photos of children lifted from their parents social media accounts and implanting them on child sexual abuse imagery sites, paedophile photo-sharing galleries and highly sexualised child modelling sites. It quotes UN figures noting that more than 200 new images of underage children are circulated daily, and the production and distribution of child pornographic images rakes in between $3 billion and over $20 billion worldwide. Thats just one example. And, what will happen when, years later, the children Google themselves, as they surely will, and happen upon a picture of themselves online they dont like, let alone one in those websites? Among various examples is the 18-year-old woman from Austria who in 2016 sued her parents for posting 500 images of her on Facebook without her consent. This posting of pictures online, including posting stories about their children in blogs by parents has been termed sharenting. Many of us sharent, though the suing is yet to be heard of in Africa. One, however, cannot rule out a confrontation in our homes of a teenager or a tween (10-14-year-old) quibbling with their parent about why the mother or father chose one picture of the child over another better one to post. In many cases, nevertheless, the children are not aware of the pictures parents post online. It is only after they discover them to their shock and dismay that it happened without even being told about it. It affects them, with studies describing complicated emotional reactions of the teens and tweens when they realise that their whole lives had been documented and told online without their consent. Getting consent from children, therefore, cannot be gainsaid. This is including in the schools, where parents should also be involved whether to put those cute pictures online. Getting childrens consent, even as adults, may be necessary. This is because, as analysis shows, the narrative can get out of your hands. For example, many Rwandans who follow happenings in Kenya may not have failed to see this one about the Nairobi County Women Representative, Esther Passaris. When she took to Twitter to congratulate her daughter who had turned 22 years old in 2018, social media stole the show with unpredictable crudity. Tell us about her virginity... someone wrote. Thanks so much for bringing up such a beautiful woman. We Team Mafisi will take good care of her, another cheered. Team mafisi is colloquial for ravenous sexual predation, evoked from the proverbial greed of the hyena in traditional lore. Hyena is fisi in Kiswahili. But what got me going on all these is Quaden Bayles, the nine-year-old Australian boy of Aborigine descent whose mother posted the heartbreaking video of him sobbing and asking for a knife to kill himself. What will become of Quaden when he grows up? He lives with achondroplasia, the condition leading to dwafism, and has been a subject of much bullying because of his condition. His mother was picking from school when she found him crying. She took the video and shared it to raise awareness about the effects of bullying. It went viral, receiving more than 25 million views before it was withdrawn due to conspiracy theories that arose questioning its motive and genuineness (some claimed Quaden was an 18 old actor). Others made copycat social media pages using his picture. The nine-year-old received a lot of sympathy from far and wide, including from film stars and sports personalities. A GoFundMe page raised hundreds of dollars to take him to DisneyLand, money which it has now been decided will fund charity campaigns on dwafism. Somebody wondered in a CNN opinion whether there was not a better way to seek support or fight bullying without compromising our childrens privacy. Sharing trauma without consent, he wrote, creates the conditions to replicate that trauma long into the future – it can expose someone to additional cruelty or serve as a disturbing and lingering reminder of that difficult moment. Quaden will probably turn out alright. He is among family that will help him navigating life online and outside it. Perhaps it was inevitable that he had to be the face of the battle, his mother being a third-generation Aboriginal activist on social issues. The views expressed in this article are of the author.
