Belated response to Blue Whale Challenge

At a time when teens have moved from Blue Whale to new genre of deadly online games like 48 Hours or 72 Hours, the Supreme Court has asked the Centre to take measures to contain the menace and ensure that no participant of the self-destructive game would die.

Hearing a PIL on Friday (October 27) that sought a ban on the Blue Whale Challenge, the apex court directed Doordarshan to prepare a 10-minute audio-visual presentation on the perils of the game and beam it on the national network to ‘contain’ the dangerous effects of such online games to life. The court gave Doordarshan a week’s time to prepare the clip to be shown both on public and private TV channels.

The three-judge bench that heard the case observed since the visual medium is most effective to convey the message about the deadly consequences of the game, the programme could be prepared in consultation with the Ministries of Women and Child Development and the Human Resource Development.

While the next hearing was posted to November 20 for a response from the government, one wonders whether such issues that should be dealt with at parental, school and societal level be brought to the highest court of the land for action.

Secondly, by passing an order, neither the government nor the judicial system can effectively implement it as the game is mostly played by teens in the privacy of their homes.

Instead, schools and their managements should be encouraged to promote awareness campaigns which will have a better impact on the youth than a short TV programme which can be easily switched off.

In fact, the Blue Whale Challenge craze has been waning worldwide and what is ‘in’ is disappearance without trace for a day or two, sending family members –and possibly the police – on a wild goose chase until the ward surfaces voluntarily.

Nevertheless, a comprehensive campaign involving the media, schools, NGOs and governments against the deleterious effects of online games that demand death as the ultimate goal should be launched to sufficiently educate the kids not to be lured by such dangerous games. More importantly, parents’ role in managing kids needs to be stressed.

At its peak, the Blue Whale Challenge has alarmed parents and police who have no clue about the game. Officially, about 30 cases have been linked to the game. Unofficially, they may be more. But still the police and concerned agencies are reported to have been probing them. It is doubtful whether they draw any conclusive proof, given the way these investigations progress, that too in the field of digital technology.

The period between July and September this year had seen the highest number of Blue Whale Challengers. Several instances had come to the notice of parents and police and in a few cases the youngsters were literally pulled out of the jaws of death.

In some other cases, young boys ended their lives in horrific ways. Police and parents had started realizing the lethal nature of the game and its ramifications only when suicides and attempts to end life from various parts of the country started pouring in the media. With little knowledge about the game, not much had been done to prevent the online Challenge from spreading its tentacles in the country.

Only when the media started ringing alarm bells of more deaths and injuries to the game addicts, Centre and state governments have moved against the Blue Whale.

While the Central government has asked major digital platforms like Facebook, Google and WhatsApp to remove all links to the Blue Whale, many state governments have drawn plans to fight the Challenge at the incubation stage itself. But they are unlikely to succeed because of the inherent problems authorities face in tackling the menace.

Courts and governments could ban the game and police could issue advisories to the public, parents and schools against the Blue Whale Challenge. But the biggest challenge for them is how to stop kids from playing the game.

Children, out of curiosity or under peer pressure, can access the game through links that are not commonly known to many surfers and start fulfilling the tasks as ordered by the Challenge’s administrator.

Until now, there is no specific knowledge about the administrator/s and what the faceless entity’s aim is to play mind games on children of impressionable age. In other words, the task before any implementing authority is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

While the onus is on cyber security experts and official machinery to catch the culprits, major responsibilities rest with parents/guardians and educational institutions.

They need to monitor their wards for unusual or strange behaviour and keep an eye on the sites they are surfing on the Internet. More importantly, awareness campaigns for parents and children in schools about the deadly online games should be made a part of the curriculum. Like in the UK, and in some other countries, police and school authorities can launch help lines for parents and the game addicts/victims.

What we have to realize is the Blue Whale Challenge is one of many other challenges that have come and gone, sucking many innocent lives during their reign in physical world. While the former plays with teens’ lives through the Net, the ‘fun games’ could pose real danger to the lives of the challenged. Nevertheless, all these end up either in death or in loss of limbs.

Listed among the game challengees are: Tombstoning where youngsters dive down from cliffs; Subway Surfing; Thumb Breaker Challenge; Fire Challenge in which the dared boy douses self with a flammable liquid and sets the body ablaze (self-immolation without a cause); Choking Game, Happy Slapping – slapping strangers and video-graphing it – though there is nothing to cheer about it!

By Madhusudhana Rao S