‘Parents Beware: Toy Car In-charge Forcibly Smooching A Boy Inside A Mall’
‘This Video Of A Little Boy Forcibly Kissed By A Toy-Car Operator Is A New Level Of Sick’
These were versions of the same story that received a lot of attention from netizens on Monday. The Logical Indian first published a video of a toddler being forcefully kissed by an adult who according to the website was in charge of joy-rides in a mall.
"This is to convey to the readers the possibilities of perverts lurking around every corner," the report said.
The report added that the video had been sent by a netizen Dishha Sharma, who had got it from a doctor, who in turn had got it a as a forward on his/her phone.
(Dishha Sharma did not respond to The News Minute’s queries).
There was much concern online with parents asking the name of the mall in which the incident occurred, some were irate that the video had been published without concealing the child’s identity and many others were angry that someone had shot the video in the first place without rescuing the child.
But it now seems that video was taken by a nine-year-old in Saudi Arabia in August 2015 and the man in the video who is seen forcibly kissing the child was his uncle. The Bangladeshi man was arrested and then let off according to a report by gdonline.com.
In the age of viral videos, it surely took no time for the video to be viewed and passed on by hundreds of people. Though the intention was perhaps to create awareness, the basic tenets of journalism seem to have been forgotten.
This child’s identity has been exposed and the video has created a sort of fear against ‘uncles who manage toy cars in malls’. More than half the number of people who panicked watching the video wondering if it was from their city will probably never get to know that it was shot in Riyadh.
How can we become more responsible netizens and journalists?
Most of us receive many videos on a daily basis as forwards. Dishha Sharma in this case was perhaps shocked at the content and sent it to a website. But in the mail she says, ‘it happened at a mall in our city.’
Everyone with a phone is a citizen journalist and so there are questions that one needs to ask oneself.
By forwarding the video to others, am I compromising the privacy of the victim who definitely would not want strangers to look at such videos?
Do I not have the responsibility to check or ask around about the origin of the video or photograph?
And for those (journalist and non-journalists) publishing or uploading such videos online-
Does it need video evidence of a toddler being molested to make us understand that perverts and child molesters are lurking out there?
Why was no attempt made to trace the video? Would the child or parents ever want this content on the web?
The video may have been from Saudi Arabia, but the message is simple. The person interested in a child sexually can be from within family or friend circle, let’s not be oblivious of that fact, ever.