A chance chat on Yahoo! rocked my world ( in not too good a manner) recently. I had logged on to the Chat forum (Politics) after a long while to dissipate boredom brought upon by me having to stay away from work due to a skin allergy and began chatting with about 2 dozen people from around the world. The conversation traversed virtually every topic over the period of 2 hours or so and veered towards children in America when a gentleman stared complaining about his kids and their boorish behaviour.
This unexpectedly, brought about a deluge of complaints from about half a dozen other parents present in the forum. Politics forgotten, the conversation seemed to have firmly shifted towards the kids of today and their fallacies.
But not everyone was against the ‘Kids of Today’ apparently, and one Mother spoke up quite passionately on their behalf. She revealed to what I assume was a stunned chat room ( I certainly was repelled and stunned), that her kids (11 & 15) had been sexually assaulted and deprived of food for long hours after they returned from school daily, while she left them under the care of a relative daily because she had to work 2 shifts being a single mom.
Slowly, the tide changed and people started coming out with their sordid and not so pleasant experiences as kids, with one gentleman from Florida reeling out statistics from various websites about mistreatment of children (especially the girl child) not only in the ‘third-world-countries’ like those of Asia and Africa, but also the more ‘advanced’ cultures of North America and Europe.
The conversation(s) left me quite disturbed and appalled to the core. I decided to do some investigative work myself on the WWW in spirit of Citizen Journalism (CJ) so much in vogue these days. I checked out certain Adult/Erotic forums and UN websites. The former to checkout the hidden attitudes of people visiting these sites and the latter to gain an insight into official worldwide statistics into the mistreatment of Children globally.
In the second endevour, I was helped out immensely by The State of the World’s Children 2009 Report by UNICEF, which basically focuses on maternal and neo-natal health and identifies the interventions and actions that must be scaled up to save the precious tiny lives.
The focus on essentials like Nutrition, Health, Education and also Child Protection are eye openers and a recommended read.
Coming to the former (Adult Forums), I essentially Googled and found about 2 dozen or so forums, each ’specilaizing’ in a particular form of sexual debauchery and erotic arts. All of these were legal adult forums for those above 18 years of age. I decided to explore the chat rooms in some of these forums instead of wasting time browsing other pages (obviously knowing, because of the very names of these respective forums about what to expect in those pages), inorder to ‘connect’ with people thronging these chat rooms and get a true idea.
At the 11th hour I decided to assume the role of a ‘connoisseur of debauchry’ and align myself with the special sexual topic which these different forums focused on, instead of attempting to ask the people in these chat rooms directly about their sexual predilections which might get them to withdraw into a shell immediately and stop chatting.
Over a period of time and I am guessing about 20 or so chats with different people which included 4 females, I subtly tried to know if these people would think about having sexual relations with someone younger than 18 if the opportunity presented itself. Two of the gentlemen turned out to be from countries where the legal age for sexual intercourse was 16 and both said that the same was their limit.
However, to my utter disgust and shock, about 4 to 5 of the so called ‘gentlemen’ were very interested in the idea and indicated that they would surely chance it, with 3 telling me that they had actually done the deed. The others, to my utter relief, seemed quite rightly disgusted with the idea and were quite empathetic in saying so. But what really appalled me was the admission of a lady that she had infact had sexual relations with underage teenaged boys till about 2 years ago. This woman had the gall to say that these interactions were ‘limited’ as if that makes it all ok!
Such an admission coming from a mature and educated lady was all the more shocking. Anyway. most of these 20 odd private conversations lasted an average of 5-12 mins because as soon as the people at the other end realised that I wasn’t really interested in anything ‘interesting’ they preferred to move on, which suited me just fine.
I had enough of this sordid research and infact at one point wondered what possessed me to explore this squalor of human nature, which, though I knew existed, still left me numb and appalled to the very core of my being.
All of this has convinced me to take a much more active part in protecting the precious childhoods of our children globally and I have begun doing so by taking part in charitable enterprises on the WWW as a beginning. The need of the hour is enpowerment of these young lives through education, proper diets, good morals and as they grow up, enough and equal opportunities for earning a living.
Anyone with greater insight into the above please feel free to comment and for those who have a game plan or want to collectively come up with one to tackle the mentioned menance(s), do contact me at pankajhrm@gmail.com.
Let me assure you that the just being part of online communities is not enough, this is a human problem in the real world and needs to be solved by us humans IN the real world.


I am not quite a believer in the ‘Valentines Day’, ‘Road Safety Day’ ,’ Father’s Day’ , ‘Mother’s Day’, etcetra line of thinking. It seems overtly insane to ‘celebrate’ certain things we should be thankful for and respectful of all year around, each day of our lives. So to all the hardcore Capitalists out there ( I am a part Capitalist, part Socialist), hate to break it to you, but you can’t put a price tag to everything.








