PNG focuses on tackling online violence

The Papua New Guinea Office of Censorship has directed its focus to tackling online violence and child abuse. Chief Censor Steven Mala has highlighted that given the modern environment, it was time to think of online violence because the psychological violence is greater than physical violence.

“Here in PNG, the Office of Censorship has striven to provide online protection to our children from unsolicited materials, sex abuse, trafficking and portrayal of children for commercial benefits,” he said. Mr Mala said that every year children had become victims of untold violence and faced various forms of abuse, neglect, exploitation and danger.

One form of abuse was online abuse which was what the Office of Censorship was focusing on in its respective awareness programs nationwide. “Our children today are being exposed to undesirable programs through television broadcasting, radio broadcasting and the daily indecent language used on the street.

 “We want to ensure that information flowing through the internet is clean and safe when our children are accessing it; we want them to grow with a healthy attitude toward the use of internet so they can better understand it and use it to their benefits and not to abuse the knowledge of internet or technology when they grow up. “Because of this we are working towards implementing a program that can provide the country with a clean Internet feed – which is the Internet Filtering System currently in progress,” Mr Mala said.

The Chief Censor said however, as citizens, all should be responsible for the future generation through daily conversations and interactions with a child. “It is our behaviour and attitude that children will imitate so my message to each and every one of you is to start respecting a child, start changing your behavior toward a child so they can be free to express their views without fear or favuor,” he said.