The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : SMS aka Smutty Messaging Service?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Nov 13, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

SMS aka Smutty Messaging Service?

What started as a revolutionary means of communication is today increasingly becoming a source of harassment and nuisance.

The cellphone that keeps people in touch with their relatives in homes, colleagues in offices and friends several hundreds of kilometres away, has today brought trouble right into people's palms, as a girl student of a private engineering college found out recently.

Ashwathi (name changed), studying in second year at a popular engineering college beyond Tambaram, received a very obscene Short Messaging Service (SMS). She chose not to reply assuming that the message was not intended for her. But it was only after a flurry of similar messages that she panicked.

She informed her parents who were alarmed. Residents of a southern suburb, they approached the Chengai (East) police. After briefing them about the harassment their daughter was subjected to, the parents requested the law enforcers to treat it as a petition enquiry. (When a complaint is treated as a petition enquiry, police do not register a case, but warn the offenders and let them go.) Police did so and got down to business quickly.

As the girl received messages from different private cellphone service providers, the police asked the girl to establish contact with one of them. This was just the baiting of the trap. The girl spoke to one of the boys and asked him to meet her. After a wait of two days, the boy walked into it.

When the girl asked the boy to come to a deluxe hotel on Grand Southern Trunk Road, he readily agreed little realising that policemen were lying in wait. Once the offender was nabbed, it was just a matter of time before the police rounded up the rest of the group that had harassed the girl for weeks together. The girl was shocked as among the four boys, two were her classmates. The third was a student in the same institution while the fourth was a common friend of the others, studying in an engineering college near Poonamallee.

The police said the boys were warned, their parents summoned and briefed on the behaviour of their wards and later let off. They could have taken action against the boys under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code and Information Technology Act, if the girl and her parents had wanted to file a case. The girl's parents feared the boys would take revenge on their daughter later. Incidentally, the girl lost her mobile phone when she went to college after a few days.

"She did not lose the handset. It was robbed. It could have been the same boys, but we could not act as the college is not in our jurisdiction and the parents did not complain," said a Chengai East police officer. With the increasing penetration of cellphones among youngsters, especially in schools and colleges, such offences might increase, he feared.

Prateep. V. Philip, Deputy Inspector-General of Police and Director, Multimedia Project, Friends of Police (FoP), said the need was to educate youth, particularly college students on how distressed women can become when they receive obscene messages and e-mails. Not to mention the risks the youth are exposing themselves to and the embarrassment to their parents when the law catches up. According to him, such instances of boy students sending vulgar messages to their own classmates only reflected the `value vacuum' in their minds. According to him: "Technology without values dehumanises; Technology with value adds to the quality of life."

He stressed the importance of parents playing a vital role to ensure that their wards are not misled.

The FoP would be used as a platform to educate youth about the risks of misusing technology, the officer said. Women can approach the FoP centre in Aminjikarai (Ph: 52186554) and lodge a complaint if they receive such messages.

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