Bangladeshi teen wins prestigious global children's award for online fight
Bangladeshi teenager Sadat Rahman made an impassioned plea Friday for more robust global action against cyberbullying and online crime involving children as he received a prestigious global children's award.
Sadat, 17, won the 2020 KidsRights International Children's Peace Prize for creating a mobile app to greatly help teenagers report cyberbullying and cyber crime in his western district of Narail in Bangladesh, AFP reports.
Previous winners of the prize include Nobel laureate and Pakistani education campaigner Malala Yousafzai and environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
"Serious action must be taken right now. Teenagers continue steadily to remain vulnerable to online crime and cyberbullying, particularly in the changing times we reside in," Rahman told AFP in a remote interview.
Rahman was awarded the prize, which is run by the Netherlands-based KidsRights foundation, in a ceremony streamed online because of coronavirus restrictions.
He beat two other finalists - Mexican girl Ivanna Ortega Serret, 12, who fought water pollution, and Irish 18-year-old Siena Castellon, who created a website to help pupils with autism and extreme learning disabilities
Rahman's "Cyber Teens" mobile software puts children touching a team of youngsters including Rahman, who call themselves the Narail Volunteers.
The Narail Volunteers then liaised with local police and social workers to help teens too scared or embarrassed to report acts of cyberbullying and cyber crime.
The iPhone app also gives useful tips and advice on online behaviour and how to prevent sexual predators.
'Teenagers needed help'
Downloaded around 1,800 times, the app has helped to solve a lot more than 60 complaints up to now -- and has resulted in the arrest of eight suspected online criminals, including adults who've been sexually harassing children.
"The theory started after a 15-year-old girl committed suicide as a result of online bullying," Rahman.
"I decided that teenagers needed help and that people should take action to attempt to avoid other children facing the same tragedy."
Rahman said in many cases teenagers were being sexually harassed by adults, including being sent pornographic and sexually explicit images.
Rights groups and police agencies have already been voicing increasing alarm over the rise in online sexual crimes involving minors because the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Cyberbullying rose by some 70 percent across an incredible number of internet sights all over the world in April and could this year, said a recently available study by the KidsRights Foundation.
Children being targeted by sexual predators including using pornography was of "grave concern", Europol added in a written report released on Wednesday.
Rahman said he planned to use his prize, which includes a 100,000 euro ($118,000) investment for projects, to help expand develop the software across Bangladesh "and hopefully to serve as a model for the rest of the world."
KidsRights has awarded the prize annually for the past 16 years "to a kid who fights courageously for children's rights."
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the patron of the Dutch-based award praised Rahman's work.
"Even in these strange occasions when things seem to be pretty bleak, young people are inspiring most of us with their concern for others and for our life together upon this planet," Tutu said in a statement delivered to AFP.
