Suffer the little children because the cell operators don’t care
Her story is particularly resonant in South Africa, where so many children are abducted, raped or murdered every single year, as highlighted by the fact that a Rawsonville man has just been charged with the murder of two-year old Sonja Brown.
In the US, a programme called ‘Amber Alert’ has been instituted, as a means of immediately getting the word out about a missing child.
Amber Alert is a scheme that uses radio, SMS and MMS to transmit information and photographs of the missing child across the country within minutes of an abduction being reported.
It has also been adapted in other nations, with the United Kingdom and Canada utilising a similar concept, known as Child Rescue Alert.
The advantages of such a scheme, particularly the MMS portion, which means immediately getting photographs of the missing child out in regular circulation – thereby making any attempted abduction that much more difficult – are obvious.
Recall how familiar Madeleine McCann’s face is, and you know right away that if you spotted her, you would know it was her instantly. Now imagine having the ability to make an abducted child’s face that familiar via MMS and you begin to understand how useful cell phones can be as a tool in the fight against this type of crime.
Which means that in theory, setting up a scheme like this in SA, a nation with fantastic network coverage, and where most people have a cellular telephone, should be a complete ‘no brainer’.
And yet, according to the Democratic Alliance (DA), they have approached our three local providers on more than one occasion about the possibility of setting up such a scheme locally, only to receive no response at all from MTN and Cell C, while Vodacom soon stopped responding to the DA’s requests to set up a meeting.
One has to ask why the cellular operators are dodging this issue? Why do we hear endless complaints about the high crime rate in this country, and yet when a scheme that can quite possibly make a dent in our horrific crime statistics is suggested, those that have the power to help simply refuse to get involved?
While I understand that the mobile operators are driven by profit (one only has to look at the ridiculously high amount we are charged to send an SMS, to know that profit is what it’s all about), surely a scheme like this – if carried out by all three operators – would not end up giving their profit margins a huge knock?
Such a programme could quite conceivably be seen as part of a company’s corporate social responsibility, and when one considers the lives that could be saved, it seems that the ‘greater good’ really should win out here.
But instead our three cellular operators continue to stick their heads in the sand, ignoring the potential their networks hold to make a positive difference to the crime situation in SA.
Maybe someone needs to explain to them that the children they can potentially save today will grow up to be the next generation of customers that will drive their profits; perhaps if it is put in monetary terms, it will make them think twice.
Otherwise they may find that one day, instead of saying ‘hello the future’, they will wake up and find that there isn’t one…
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