WhatsApp, idling or betting: What is your child up to during this holiday?

Children playing on their mobile phone and tablet.

A group of teenagers are huddled around a phone on the corridors of the line of shops along Moi Avenue in Nairobi’s Central Business District (CBD).

They are so engrossed in what they are watching that they do not budge even when passers-by shove at them to give way.

Business people around the CBD say the onset of school holidays brings an influx of children into town and spending time in shops and cyber cafés.

“Most of these young people come to town to bet. They are addicted to betting, those who do not have phones come to cyber cafes. They arrive as early as 8am and when they suspect their parents are almost leaving work, you see them sneaking into buses to go home,” says Hillary Thuku who runs a restaurant in town.

Scary image

Evans Munga, programmes manager at African Network for Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN) casts a scary image of what children could be doing online. He says research shows an increase of young people engaging in secret chat groups where predators await to lure them into sex or child trafficking.

“School holidays is the season when predators take advantage. They know children are moving around without supervision, so they get behind the screens and befriend them,” he says.

He advises that parents should be in touch with what their children are doing by assigning them chores and activities to keep them busy. If parents have allowed children to have phones, he says, they should scrutinise and monitor applications they download on their gadgets and follow them on social media to see what they are doing online.

The shocking nude images posted by teenagers over the April holidays on Instagram reinforced the idea that young people can misuse social media if not monitored. Although Kenyans reacted by creating the hashtag #IfikieWazazi to expose what young people do behind their screens, the reality that school holidays are often exploited became apparent.

Being offline does not guarantee safety for the children. Peter Ouko, former prisoner and founder of “Crime Si Poa”, a youth safety awareness group, says during school holidays, they get a lot of reports of young people mugging residents in estates.

“There is peer pressure and they are desperate for things their friends have. They end up engaging in crime,” says Ouko.

He blames parents for not questioning their children when they come home with things they cannot afford.

“If your child comes home with an expensive phone or anything you did not buy, interrogate them and take measures. One day, the police will come for them and you’ll realise you were bringing up a thief,” he says.

With schools closed for the next two months, parents are conflicted on how to maintain a balance between ensuring their children are safe and crossing over to paranoia.

Monitoring apps

“You spend most of your time wondering what they are doing. They have many Whatsappgroups where they discuss school work and stay in touch with each other. They seem to be so busy that you have to take away their phones for them to look at you,” says Grace Keumbu, who has three children aged between six and 13.

What has worked for her, she says, is installing monitoring apps on their phones and randomly checking their privacy settings to ensure they are not in any secret chat groups.

Alexander Kiraithe, a retired teacher and founder of Gateway Primary school in Meru sighs and says he misses the old days when children were not distracted by technology, and they would use holidays to help their parents and get together with their extended family.

“Parents are too busy. They leave before their children wake up and come back when they are asleep. The children start finding ways to entertain themselves, and some of those ways are risky,” says Mr Kiraithe.

In April, Terre des Hommes Netherlands, in its report titled ‘The Dark Side of the Internet for Children – Online Sexual Exploitation in Kenya, says children are live streaming sexual acts, with some doing it under the same roof as their parents. The international children’s organisation detailed how predators use false identities to lure minors into sex orgies.