A collage showing the post on child trafficking incident with a photo of Facebook users.Sex trafficking, abuse, harassment—the news media is replete with incidents involving one or all of the said atrocities. Amid all the notoriety, a message about an alleged child trafficking incident at a popular shopping mall in Kochi has popped up in social media accelerating caution and fear among the netizens.
This message claiming to be from Team Swaraksha, an anti-child abuse campaign, has been doing rounds for the past few days with hundreds of shares and a lot more gasps for comments. It claims that a five-year-old girl (some posts say 6-year-old), who was in the mall with her parents, suddenly went missing. Her parents alerted the security personnel, who closed all doors of the mall and the girl was recovered from the basement with her head shaved, clothes changed. And, all of that took place within 10 minutes, the message claims.
This word of caution, supposedly in good intention, is a hoax, Onmanorama has confirmed.
“I've no idea who is spreading this message,” said activist Sunitha Krishnan, whose NGO Prajwala runs the caravan campaign called Swaraksha that aims to educate people about physical or sexual abuse against children.
“In the name of freedom of speech, any news can get by without the information getting verified by an authentic source. Blindly endorsing such posts without validating who is claiming them is a mistake”, said Sunitha, who was awarded the Padma Shri by the government as an acknowledgement for her social work.
Is the message trying to imply that malls are a threat to child safety? “What place isn't a threat, even your own home is,” she said.
Same post – from Gurgaon to Kochi
Onmanorama also found out that the same message was being circulated on social media, but with place name Gurgaon instead of Kochi.
Another viral FB post that talks about a child trafficking incident in a mall in Gurgaon.After this report was filed, netizens commented that they had seen this post earlier too, with some claiming that they saw similar content on the Internet almost a year ago.
