Clampdown on Kyrgyz Youth Internet Craze

Bishkek city council wants to restrict children’s access to internet cafes.

By Gulnara Mambetalieva in Bishkek (RCA No. 527, 18-Jan-08)

Horrified by the amount of time that teenagers and even small children are spending in Bishkek’s internet cafes when they should either be in class or in bed, the authorities in the Kyrgyz capital have voted to ban them from going clubs during school hours and after seven in the evening.

A specially created commission reported that it found more than a hundred children sitting in internet cafes playing games during school hours and at night over a one-month period.

The city council said it feared children were also viewing pornographic material or visiting sites espousing extremist views without supervision.

Vyacheslav Krasienko, deputy chair of the city council and one of the sponsors of the clampdown, said unrestricted access to certain kinds of sites was almost certainly responsible for rising crime rates. These sites, he said, encouraged aggressive and volatile behaviour in children, as well as slowing their intellectual development.

He said his only regret was not introducing a clampdown several years ago, when the proliferation of internet cafes first started.

Krasienko said the local by-law, which came into force in January, would apply to all young people under the age of 18. A special regulatory body will be established shortly to make sure the law is observed.

Few experts dispute that young people in Bishkek are internet crazy. The centre of the capital is crammed with internet cafes and clubs, many of them open 24 hours a day and almost permanently full with users, most of them young.

Kyrgyzstan leads all other Central Asian states in terms of web users per capita. In 2007, about ten per cent of the five million population had permanent access to the internet.

Those who do not have computers at home crowd the cafes whose reasonable prices make them affordable to most people, especially when several youngsters club together and pay to use a single computer. An hour of internet access costs only about 20 soms, just over 50 US cents. Playing games over the web is even cheaper at just 10 soms an hour.

Janarkul Isaeva, a Bishkek psychologist, applauds the council for trying to curb children’s passion for cyberspace. But she worries that the core problem is not so much playing internet games as the changing patterns of family life.

“The fact that [so many] children spend their time outside the house at gaming stations shows they feel uncomfortable at home and that their parents simply don’t care about them,” she says.

Isaeva also fears that the current addiction to web-based games among youngsters will lead to worse social problems in future, and that a passion for computer games could grow into a more serious addiction for gambling.

Ruslan Suleymanov, director of the Schmel network of internet cafes, argues that placing restrictions on young people’s access to these places will not solve the truancy problem.

“We need special school programmes, we need to talk to children, and the parents also must pay more attention to them,” he said.

Sociologists point out that the computer craze is at least partly the result of complex social and economic trends. Many parents have to spend most of their time earning money and leave their children without supervision.

They say this partial ban on schoolchildren using the web would be more effective if it was introduced in parallel with other initiatives such as encouraging them to get involved in sports and clubs of a more cerebral nature at schools.

Many families can no longer afford to go to local swimming pools, for example, as these often cost 50 to 200 soms per person – several times the price of an hour in an internet café.

Irina Kirichenko is aware that her ten-year-old son Andrei visits internet cafes without her permission when she is at work. She says she would feel happier if she knew a police officer was patrolling these places to make sure children stay away during school hours.

“If it was possible, I would like to close all the net clubs because these games produce aggression, violence and depression in children,” she adds. “But I have to be realistic and accept that this [council] instruction is not going to close all the clubs. They would simply go underground, anyway, as they earn too much money.”

Dmitry Vlasin, director of a network of internet clubs in Bishkek, warns that once the new rules are enforced, many internet cafes will face such a dramatic loss of earnings that they will continue to allow children in.

“The profit from children playing games makes up 90 per cent of the whole takings,” he says. “If access [for children] is restricted, this business will simply go bankrupt.”

Suleymanov makes the same point. “If children are banned from net clubs, most of them will lose half their earnings,” he said. “Many will have to close down.”

Asel, the administrator at one internet café in Bishkek, supports the city council’s move, although she is afraid she could end up losing her job.

“It’s absolutely wrong that children play on them for hours,” she says. “But this initiative by the city council needs to be weighed up thoroughly. If we can’t allow children to enter the clubs to play at all, we will be simply ruined.”

As for the children themselves, they are less than enthusiastic about the plan to clamp down on their favourite pastime.

Arslan, a fourth grade pupil in Bishkek, says computer games are so popular among his peers that they do not know what they will do after the ban takes effect.

“There are two internet centres near my house but they are always full so we have to wait our turn,” he said. “If they close, it will be terrible because we will become very bored. What are we going to do then?”

Gulnara Mambetalieva is an IWPR contributor in Bishkek.