Minister urges public to report children exposed to online gambling

Minister of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection (PPPA), Arifah Fauzi, has urged all levels of society to actively report any indications of digital exploitation or activities endangering children, including online gambling. “The public can utilise the official complaint service through Sahabat Perempuan dan Anak (SAPA) 129 or via WhatsApp at number 08111-129-129,” Minister Arifah Fauzi stated in Jakarta on Friday. “In the field, the grip of online gambling has been proven to trigger mental disorders and extreme addiction, a drastic decline in academic performance due to loss of focus in studying, and even secondary criminal behaviour,” Arifah Fauzi said. Furthermore, trapped children may resort to stealing money from their parents, lying, committing digital fraud within their peer circles, and becoming involved with illegal online loans to fund their next online gambling bets. Arifah Fauzi stated that protecting children from exposure to online gambling has now become a national urgency, equally as important as preventing them from other negative content, such as addictive online games and pornography. All three are threats of the same level that exploit children’s dopamine and damage the prefrontal cortex, which regulates emotional control and decision-making. “If pornography destroys morals and addictive games consume productive time, online gambling completes the destruction with financial and social ruin from an early age,” Minister Arifatul Choiri Fauzi said. In an effort to suppress the rate of online gambling exposure, which has already reached 200,000 children, the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs has been actively cutting off access to content indicative of online gambling. Meanwhile, the KemenPPPA is accelerating the implementation of the Presidential Regulation on the Roadmap for Child Protection in the Digital Realm (PARD) as a national policy direction for creating a safe and child-friendly digital ecosystem.