Concept note: Internet, social media, and adolescent child safety in Nepal

(Rajesh Poudel)

When I asked at a program in the hills of far-western Nepal, “Do you know that you can monitor your child’s phone activities?” only one hand went up.

Children and teens online are vulnerable to bullying, grooming, predation, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and exploitation. The internet can be a dangerous locale not only for children but for adults as well. According to the Nepal Police’s Cyber Bureau, around four thousand cyber-crimes were registered in the fiscal year 2020/21, and it is one of the biggest rising crimes. Of them, more than eleven hundred cases were related to children (individuals under 18). Facebook, where more than one-third of Nepal’s population is active, has been the social media platform of choice for perpetrators of cybercrimes.

One worrying development , however, is social media’s role in the persistence of child marriage in Nepal. A case in point is a recent household survey conducted in Doti and Bajura. It showed that half of more than 400 child marriages in the past three years had social media as the root cause. These child brides and grooms (under 18) had fallen in love on Facebook and eloped later.

Apparently, the number of parents or adult family members arranging a child marriage is in sharp decline in recent years in the mid-hills of Nepal. However, the situation seems to be different in the Madesh Province, where most marriages, including child marriages, are arranged by parents. Nevertheless, love marriages are on the rise in the province.

The dimensions of child marriage have certainly changed. However, the telltale signs of such an ominous change had started to emerge as early as a decade ago. My friends and I were in Baglung, surveying various social issues. Mobile phones cropped up as a novel factor causing “teenage love” and subsequent elopement—in legal terms, child marriage. Now, it has gone fully digital.

Mobile phones brought an unprecedented level of connectivity to rural Nepal. Mobile phones were a sign of things to come, of the progress and development that had been denied to rural Nepalis since the founding of this country. Compared to other infrastructures of development, communications technology and mobile phones became ubiquitous in a relatively short time.

Even in settlements not connected to the national electricity grid or at the lowest rung of the socio-economic chances are you will find a smartphone. Even a low-income family can now afford a basic smartphone and get online. In recent years, smartphones have flooded all corners of Nepal, proven by the fact that more than 73% of Nepali households own a smartphone.

Hormonal and physical changes in puberty lead to an increase in sexual feelings and attraction to another person. Such pubertal adolescents and teens seek ways to meet up with each other. And they do so online on social networking sites such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Instagram, and Snapchat without their parents and guardians knowing about it.

The current law sets the minimum age of marriage at twenty for both men and women. Nepal declared the practice of child marriage illegal in 1963. Sixty years later, more than one-third of girls in Nepal get married before they reach their eighteenth birthday. It is rather ironic that child marriage, one of the most primitive forms of social union, is driven by the latest information and communications technology. It should have helped prevent it, not exacerbate it.

These children are not illiterate adolescents but students in the ninth to twelfth grades, aged 14–18 years. They are not completely unfamiliar with the educational, psycho-emotional, health, and economic consequences of child marriage. More importantly, these are tech-savvy and social media-literate adolescents

As young individuals trying to understand and navigate the world, they seem to neglect problems such as early pregnancy, school dropout, domestic violence, and financial difficulties that follow such union.

Preventing children from going online is neither practical nor desirable. They need it for getting information, communicating, building digital skills, and, more importantly, improving learning in a country where books do not reach rural children on time, reference material is almost nonexistent, and teachers are highly incompetent.

Closing the educational, gender, economic, and digital gaps with smartphones is a potentially beneficial and plausible aim. For instance, with the nationwide closure of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented rush for remote learning was seen in and worldwide. Young learners across the country relied on digital devices, including smartphones, to continue their education.

More than 95 percent of households in Nepal have access to electricity now. It means more computer labs, online education or blended learning, better mobile network coverage, and long reading and learning hours for children. In sum, better learning opportunities for children. On the flip side, however, it implies more digital devices at home and potentially more screen time with easy access, including unsupervised social media use by adolescent children, falling in love, and elopement.

Parents’ role is crucial in ensuring their children’s safety online. They should initiate conversations with their children about all aspects of online safety and explain to them about potential dangers they may face online, such as cyberbullying, online predators, and exposure to unsafe content. Parents could also limit their children’s screen time and encourage them to engage in healthy activities like reading, doing assignments, playing sports, or spending time with friends and family.

Parents or adult members of the family should monitor children’s online activity, including webpages they frequent, apps they use, and people they interact with and befriend online. Parents or family members can use software or apps that can help restrict children’s access to certain websites or apps and track their online activity. Parents can be good role models by demonstrating responsible internet and smartphone use.

In the past three months, I have had the opportunity to interact with grade 8-10 students in Kailali, Bardiya, Rauthahat, and Dhanusa districts. I asked them whether they used smartphones for studying. An overwhelming majority of them said yes. On their parents or adult family members’ smartphones, apart from using Google and YouTube to get answers or solutions to their questions, they also visited Facebook or TikTok. Some of these children had also appeared in TikTok videos. However, almost none of them said that they owned a phone.

While schools in Nepal restrict children from bringing their phones to school, their responsibility does not end there. Schools play a central role in educating and guiding children about what’s right and wrong, so they could play a vital role in the meaningful use of smartphones and avoiding dangers. Through the school management committee and parent-teacher association– each school has one– schools could sensitize and guide parents to let their children meaningfully and safely browse the internet.

As duty bearers, local governments also have a central role in ensuring the safety of children and adolescents online and preventing child marriage. Local governments should devise and implement digital safety programs working with schools and other local actors to raise awareness of children, parents, and teachers.

Raising children’s awareness of the dangers of social media and the internet and having parents understand the importance of internet safety, and monitoring children’s online activity could be instrumental in protecting children.