Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 11
ICT as a protection tool against child exploitation
As the UNODC (2011) report notes, domestic laws in the South Asia region lack 
a shared understanding of trafficking. The most commonly applied definition is the 
one adopted by the SAARC Trafficking Convention which, as was noted already, is 
limited to trafficking for sexual exploitation. Nonetheless, it is important to have a 
common understanding between governments and other MCA stakeholders in or-
der to ensure the effectiveness of cooperation efforts and the development of future 
policy.
A “missing child” is generally understood to be a person under the age of 18 years 
whose whereabouts are unknown. This definition encapsulates a range of sub-categories 
of missing children. The International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) 
has identified a number of these, including but not limited to: “Endangered Runaway,” 
“Family Abduction,” “Non-family Abduction,” Lost, Injured, or otherwise missing and 
“Abandoned or Unaccompanied Minor.”
The ICMEC highlight the importance of understanding what is meant by a miss-
ing child:
A common definition of a ‘missing child’ with clear categories facilitates coordi-
nation and communication across jurisdictions and ensures that policies and pro-
grams comprehensively address all aspects of missing children’s issues. Although 
all missing child cases should receive immediate attention, investigative proce-
dures following the initial report may vary based on the case circumstances.
Already a large body of knowledge exists in relation to the recording and alert-
ing of missing children. At a regional level there are a myriad of formats in use 
to describing a missing child. Getting agreement on a shared, comprehensive data 
model, with coded typologies to describe the status of a missing child, the physical 
identification markings on him or her, etc. will ensure coherence and consistency 
of information and will facilitate faster searching across systems. This data model 
should also support the use of noncoded data, and in particular photographic and 
biometric data.
The use of coded typologies will ensure that the recording of missing and found 
children is consistent across all languages, and that matches can be found between 
records entered in different languages.
The MCA program should take a proactive role in efforts to develop coded ty-
pologies or thesauri to support consistent and standard reporting of missing children 
in South Asia, in line with child protection norms and best practice. This should be 
done in collaboration with ICMEC who are already working in a number of related 
research areas.