Nobel laureate Satyarthi calls on bankers to address online transactions involving child sexual abuse

Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi on Wednesday called on bankers to play an important role in addressing the serious issue of online child sexual abuse and urged technocrats to break the chain of receiving money for such activities online.Girls are picked up and lured to perform the bond and eventually they are put into prostitutions.

Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi on Wednesday called on bankers to play an important role in addressing the serious issue of online child sexual abuse and urged technocrats to break the chain of receiving money for such activities online.

“Girls are picked up and lured to perform the bond and eventually they are put into prostitutions. They are sold from one country to another country or other region, trafficking,” he said at the Singapore Fintech Festival’s Global Plenary session.

Bankers can play an important role in addressing the serious issue of online child sexual abuse. Technocrats, technological people and engineers can play an important role in breaking down this entire chain because the money is received online, he said.

Satyarthi, co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, said he wants these activities checked and stopped.

''The bankers can take the lead role and be the champions. They should hold the borrowers accountable so that they can ensure that no child labour, no child slave and no forced labour is engaged in any activities,'' he said. “That is very much possible,” he added.

He called for due diligence in ensuring some of the universal agreed principles of the International Labour Organisation or the United Nations. These should help check money lending and money transferring that eventually discriminate against children and innocent boys and girls, he said.

“My hope here is that some of the engineers can come forward and investors should make sure that children should not be trafficked,” he told some 1,500 delegates at the festival.

“These girls and boys are our sisters and brothers, that sense should prevail right from the beginning for the bankers, companies, engineers and technologies,” he stressed.

“Make every child free. Every child deserves freedom, education, healthcare and protection,” said Satyarthi in his address at the start of a three-day festival themed “SFF Dialogue with Nobel Laureate”.