There was no cry for help, no shattering glass, no sound of footsteps in the dark. Only the pale blue glow of a phone screen — the new frontier of loneliness — where a sixteen-year-old boy from Kerala wandered, searching for connection, and met those who prey on innocence cloaked in anonymity. Fourteen people, including government employees, allegedly trapped and sexually assaulted him after befriending him on a dating app meant for adults. He had been using fake profiles for nearly two years, constructing a virtual existence that blurred the lines between curiosity and danger. What happened to him was not an aberration; it was the logical consequence of a society that embraces technology but neglects its moral scaffolding. Behind every app promising friendship lies the possibility of entrapment. Behind every child’s quiet dependence on a screen is an unseen cry for attention. The predators of our time no longer stalk the night; they hide in feeds and chatrooms, masked by false profiles and artificial empathy. The tragedy in Kerala is a symptom of a larger malady — a failure to recognise that digital exposure without emotional guidance is fast eroding the sanctity of childhood. The internet, once hailed as a liberating space of knowledge and connection, has become a dark bazaar where identities are traded, boundaries erased, and children left to fend for themselves in a realm that flatters their curiosity and punishes their trust.
Kerala’s Digital De-addiction (D-DAD) initiative, launched in 2023, offers a rare example of institutional awareness in a country that still confuses mobile addiction with mischief. The programme’s premise is simple but profound: to treat digital dependence as a public health concern, not a parental inconvenience. Across its six centres — from Thiruvananthapuram to Kozhikode — counsellors have handled nearly two thousand cases in two years, ranging from gaming compulsion to obsessive social media use. The initiative’s success lies in confronting denial, both familial and cultural. For long, addiction to screens was invisible because it carried no odour, no needle marks, no empty bottles — only silence. Now, parents who once dismissed warnings are walking into counselling rooms asking for help. The project’s reach, soon to extend to more districts, is an acknowledgement that technology’s grip on young minds is tightening faster than institutions can respond. Boys are increasingly consumed by violent gaming ecosystems that reward dominance, while girls are drawn to social platforms that monetise insecurity. This gendered pattern of addiction is as telling as it is alarming. Dating apps, meanwhile, have emerged as the new predators’ playground — built without effective age verification, regulated weakly, and advertised aggressively. Most operate through offshore servers, well beyond the grasp of Indian law, and their algorithms, designed to reward engagement, often end up amplifying exploitation. While India has introduced controls on online gaming, the same urgency is missing in policing social media and dating platforms. Without legislative teeth and moral clarity, predators will continue to thrive in the spaces where technology’s convenience meets society’s complacency.
Yet, the greater crisis extends beyond law enforcement or digital regulation; it lies in the slow moral corrosion of everyday life. The modern child is growing up surrounded by connectivity but starved of connection. Homes are quieter but colder, conversations fewer but screens brighter. The vacuum left by emotional neglect has become the new breeding ground for digital predators. Between 2021 and 2025, Kerala recorded forty-one suicides linked to mobile and internet misuse and thirty other cases where minors became entangled in sexual or narcotics crimes through online platforms. Each of these numbers hides a story of a child who was seen online but invisible in life. Programmes like D-DAD and the Women and Child Development Department’s Our Responsibility to Children initiative offer templates of hope, but they must be strengthened into national policy. Schools must integrate digital literacy that goes beyond tutorials to teach restraint, empathy, and critical awareness. Parents must reclaim the role of guide, not just provider, and understand that supervision is not surveillance but protection. Tech companies, which profit from every tap, must be held accountable for every harm caused by their negligence. The boy from Kerala survived, but many others may not. His ordeal is not just a legal case — it is a mirror reflecting our collective neglect. The screen that betrayed him also indicts us, because every unmonitored device, every ignored warning, every child left to scroll unsupervised is a tragedy waiting to be written. The silence of that glowing rectangle was not just his isolation; it is the echo of a generation losing its way while the world looks on, distracted, scrolling endlessly through the very screens that are consuming its future.