What is the issue?
- There has been rising number of deaths worldwide and in India in the name of Blue Whale Challenge.
- It calls for understanding the idea behind getting attracted to such life-threatening games.
What is the Blue Whale Challenge?
- The game is a series of 50 challenges that must be completed over 50 days, with the last one being to kill oneself.
- Each player is assigned a moderator to assign the task for the day.
- The moderator takes the players through the process of executing the challenge, including the last task.
- Reports have stated that players are not allowed to withdraw and that the moderators ensure compliance by the players.
- The game is preying upon young, impressionable minds and eventually leading to their death.
What pushes children into this?
- Parenting - The drawbacks in present parenting style and reducing social time with the parents, increases the children's time spent on digital devices.
- The game gives the children what they don’t have in real life; the warmth, understanding, and connections.
- Children feel being under the spotlight while playing game, contrary to the isolation in real life.
- Mental health taboo - India still considers seeking help for mental health issues a taboo.
- While this is the condition with adults themselves, guiding a child appropriately in mental health issues is even more challenging.
- Guidance from a mental health professional is a least thought out option.
- Given this, games like the Blue Whale challenge, offer the players - the children and teenagers in their privacy, the attention and validation that they yearn for.
- Role of schools - Schools are as integral a part of shaping a child’s psyche as parenting is.
- Kids being isolated in schools for various reasons are often unnoticed by the teachers and the management.
- Counselling professionals being part of the school and addressing these issues are very rare, especially in the Indian context.
- The isolated children seeking social approval and acceptance, are attracted to the options where they are given these.
What is the psychology behind creating this?
- Psychologists worldwide feel that people are increasingly turning to external sources of validation.
- Increasing social or domestic isolation attracts many to games like the Blue Whale Challenge.
- The moderators of the game exploit this social weakness of the young minds.
- The creator of the game admitted that the victims of the game are ‘biological waste’ and that he was ‘cleansing the society’.
What is the way forward?
- This dark side of the internet impacting children's life calls for attention to our transforming social system.
- Child psychology, parenting, social support system, etc should be brought under government's policy focus to build a healthy society and put an end to games engulfing lives.
Source: Indian Express
