The Dot Behind the Ear

It is past eleven on the night of the first birthday, and the house has finally gone quiet. On the sofa, a parent is scrolling through forty photos from the evening, looking for the one. There it is. Cake on one cheek, a fist in the frosting, the new clothes already ruined. It goes on the status, then to the family group, then to the cousins abroad. By morning the replies are piling up, hearts and blessings from people who have known this child for exactly one year.

Nothing about that photo is wrong. Keep taking them, and keep posting the ones you love.

It asks you to look at something older. In many Indian homes, before a new baby goes out for the first time, someone presses a dot of kajal onto the skin. On the cheek, at the edge of the forehead, behind the ear. When the child turns fretful after a crowded wedding, an older woman sits them in her lap, circles a fistful of salt and dry chillies around the small head, and throws it into the fire while the child squirms to get down. Nazar. Drishti. Nojor. Every language in the house has a word for it.

Some of us still believe in it. Many of us keep the dot only because someone we loved once put it on us. But listen to the replies under that birthday photo, or to any guest holding a new baby, and you will hear the part of the custom that matters most now. Nazar na lage. Mashallah. Notice who says it. Not the mother. The person admiring the child. The one who is looking takes it on themselves to make sure their eye does no harm.

We have spent generations teaching our children to receive that blessing. This essay is about teaching them to give it.

Who the eye is now

There are apps now that take one ordinary photo of a person and turn it into a sexual image in seconds. No skill is needed and no second picture. In January, India watched a major social platform’s own AI tool do this in public, thousands of times an hour at its peak, to photos of women and girls that other people had posted. Some of them were children. The IT ministry ordered the platform to take the images down and report back within seventy-two hours.

The companies that build and sell these tools have made this easy, and they should answer for it. But no tool picks itself up. Someone chooses the photo, and someone sends the result on.

In May 2024, police in Bengaluru arrested three people for making nude images from the photos of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl and spreading them online. Two of the three were boys still under eighteen. In September, at a college in Kottayam, a student was found to have used AI on photos of his classmates and teachers. He had taken those photos himself, on his own phone, the way friends photograph each other every day. Nobody had posted anything.

That is who the eye usually is. Not a stranger in another country. A classmate, a cousin, a boy in the same group chat, holding a phone that is very often bought by a family like yours. And behind each one who makes a picture stand the twenty who pass it on, each forward another eye falling on the same child.

Most of the children shown in these images are girls. In the AI-made abuse images the UK’s hotline found in 2025, 97 in every 100 were. In both Indian cases above, the ones holding the phone were boys and young men.

The parent who posted the birthday photo did not make any of this happen. Two kinds of people do wrong here: the one who makes the image, and everyone who sends it on.

The child who holds the phone

Ask most families what they fear, and they will name a daughter’s photo in the wrong hands. Very few ask what their own son would do if that photo reached his phone tonight.

It is a fair question, and it is not an accusation. Most boys will never make a picture like this. Many will be sent one. Researchers who surveyed 1,200 young people in the United States found that one in six still thought these images were not really harmful, because they are not real. That one belief is the whole of the forward. It’s fake, yaar. It’s just a joke. What a child does in the next minute after the picture arrives decides how far it goes.

So teach them the old custom in its new form. A family that taught a child to say nazar na lage over a cousin’s baby can teach that child to be the one eye in the group that protects. Say one sentence to every child in your house who has a phone, sons and daughters both. Say it to the nephew who stays with you in the holidays too.

A picture of a person is that person. If one ever reaches you, of you or of anyone, it stops with you, and you come to me. You will never be in trouble for telling.

A good moment is the next time a picture of anyone comes up on a phone you are looking at together. A cousin’s wedding photo, a forward in the family group, a school picture. Look at it with them, and say it then.

Each part of that sentence does a job. That person answers the boy who says it’s only fake. It stops with you means do not forward it, not even to warn someone, not even to show a friend how bad it is. Tell the person it is about, quietly, and offer to go with them to an adult. Of you is for the day the picture is of your own child, and it matters for sons as much as daughters. When these pictures are used to blackmail children for money, most of the children targeted are teenage boys.

And you will never be in trouble has to be true. In the same survey, six in ten young people said they would tell a parent if a fake picture were made of them. Among those it had actually happened to, one in three had told a parent. Many things sit in that gap. Fear of what the family will do is the one a family can remove. No shouting. No taking the phone. No what did you do.

None of this needs an app, or English, or knowing how the tools work. A grandmother who ties a black thread on a newborn’s wrist can say that sentence. So can the aunt who forwards everything, the teacher who runs the class group, and the cousin everyone listens to. The more voices a child hears it from, the more it sounds like the way this family is.

Then, as for your own posting, treat the child’s picture with the same courtesy. Once a child is old enough to answer, ask before you send. Can I put this one up? In a 2019 study across twenty-five countries, India among them, four teenagers in ten said their parents’ posts about them were a problem for them. Choose who sees your status, and keep the school name and full name out of the caption. That is good manners towards your own child. What keeps them safe is the sentence.

Taking it off the child

Think again of the woman with the salt. When nazar caught a child, nobody scolded the baby for being lovely, or asked what the child had done to draw the eye. She took the harm off the child with her own hands and carried it out of the house. And she never did it once and called it finished. If the child was unwell again the next week, the salt went round again, as many times as it took.

If the day comes, do the same. If you hear about it from a relative or a teacher first, go to your child before you go to anyone else, gently and alone. Do not ask whether it is really them. Do not ask why the photo existed, even if they sent it themselves. Ask what they want to happen first, and who they want told. The law requires adults to report this, so a report will be made, but your child can still shape how each step goes and who sits with them. Someone took their control away. Give back every piece of it you can.

Do not keep it inside the house to protect the family’s name. No name is worth more than the child. A family’s good name has never been kept by hiding a child’s pain, and it is kept now by standing next to them where everyone can see.

A report is where this starts, and it is rarely a smooth start. You may be sent from the police station to the cyber cell and back, or meet an officer who has not handled a case like this before. It can take weeks, and it is tiring. Ask for your complaint in writing and keep its number. And do not do it alone. There are people whose work is to walk a family through every step, and their number is at the end of this essay.

The picture may come down in one place and turn up in another months later, and if it does, you do it all again, the way the salt went round again. Stay close on the days your child dreads, like the first day back at school. And find them someone to talk to who is not you, because children often hide from their parents how bad it feels.

If the one who made the picture turns out to be a child you know, perhaps even one from your own family, the same rules hold. Report it all the same. The law deals with children who harm others through its own juvenile system, and that child needs adults who will not look away either.

If it has already happened

• Do not forward, save or screenshot the image, not even as proof. Keeping it can itself be an offence. Write down the app, the account name and the link instead. On a chat app there is often no link, so write down the group’s name, the number that sent it, and the date and time.
• If it is your child, report it in your own name, at your local police station or on cybercrime.gov.in, using the option that gives you a complaint number to follow. Under POCSO, the law against sexual offences on children, a sexual image that appears to show a child counts as abuse material even if a computer made or changed it. Making it, keeping it or passing it on can all be crimes.
• If you came across such an image of a child you do not know, the same site lets you report it without giving your name.
• Report it on the platform as well. If the image is of your child, India’s IT rules give the platform two hours to take it down after your complaint.
• If the person who made it is another child, tell the school, which has to report it too. Do not settle it privately with the other family, and do not name either child in any group.
• For someone to help you through all of it, from the complaint to getting the picture taken down, call Meri Trustline on 6363176363, by phone or WhatsApp, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. It is run by Rati Foundation for people facing abuse online.
• Outside those hours, or just to file a complaint, call the cybercrime helpline on 1930. If a child is in danger right now, call 112. To talk to someone about a frightened child, call 1098, the national child helpline, free, at any hour.

Next week, someone in the family will post a new baby in new clothes, and your son will scroll past it on the sofa beside you. Maybe he will type nazar na lage under it without thinking, the way he has heard it said all his life. Ask him what it means. Then tell him the rest of it.

If a child is in danger right now, call 112. If a child has been harmed, or you are worried about one, call 1098, the national child helpline, free, any time of day. For emotional support, iCALL offers free and confidential counselling on 9152987821. This is a hard subject. If it is close to you, you do not have to carry it alone.