How are you protecting your child against porn exposure and addiction?

A clip was making rounds last year on YouTube of a pastor cautioning parents on children’s exposure to pornography. Pastor Elizabeth Mokoro narrated how a four-year old girl was caught having sex with two boys (also four) in the church toilet.

“When the mum heard what her girl had done, she beat her. She never dug deeper to know why her four-year-old daughter was having sex in the toilet,” the Pastor Elizabeth continued amid gasps of disbelief.

It turns out, the child was introduced to pornography by a neighbour.

“Let us be careful with our children, don’t just leave them with people as you run errands because you don’t know what your child will be exposed to.”

A study done in 2015 revealed that at least 97 per cent of young men below the age of 24 years have accessed and used sexually explicit material at some point, and more than half were first exposed below the age of 15.

The study done by counselling psychologist Dr Anne Wamathai sampled 487 male university students in Kenya, and found that 6 per cent of them were first exposed to pornography before age 10 and 16 per cent were first exposed between ages 10 and 12.

And while scholars have proven that pornography addiction is more prevalent among young men and male teenagers, several studies show that a significant number of female teenagers are also affected.

For a long time, Eva* (not her real name), 24, was among the statistic of the young girls hooked to sexually explicit material, and although she got over the addiction, it left an indelible mark in her life that affects her perspective of sex to date.

She was just 11 years old when she stumbled upon a digital video disk (DVD) containing pornography and innocently played it without knowing its contents. Enthralled, Eva’s addiction started to slowly creep in even before puberty.

“I did not talk to anyone about it then, but when I got older and realised that I was already addicted, I started to share my concerns with some of my peers. I was seeking help but to my surprise, most of them were also addicted to porn and didn’t offer much help.”

Pornography use, let alone addiction, has been proven to have multiple effects on children and adolescents, amongst them earlier than usual sexual debut, sexual aggression and irresponsible sexual behaviour.

By the time Eva was a teenager, she was masturbating on a regular basis, because “watching porn only could not satisfy the sexual desire it had created in me,” she says. That too didn’t quench the beast that was steadily taking over Eva’s life and she began having sex.

At 15, Eva got pregnant. When she found out, she decided to terminate the pregnancy so as not to upset some well-wishers who were sponsoring her education and her close family.

“I suffered in silence for some years, battling the addiction and the guilt of what I had done. Just before completing high school, I had an encounter with God and was delivered from my porn addiction.”

Though scarred, Eva notes that she was spared some brunt of porn and the promiscuous life she led such as getting infected with HIV.

Eva believes she wouldn’t have been in this predicament if the adults around her had protected her from exposure to porn especially at such a tender age.

“Adults should be able to tell if something is wrong with a child. They should monitor them more. They need not to shy away from educating their children on sex because the lack of sex education for sure fuelled my addiction to pornography,” she notes.

Matt* (not his real name), 24, is also a recovering porn addict and has been clean for nearly four years now. Like Eva, he got into using the explicit material quite early and by accident.

He was 14 at the time and stumbled upon some internet videos on his slightly older friend’s phone, which he viewed out of curiosity, and from that single instance, it grew into a habit that would soon be bolstered by his personal phone gifted to him by his parents.

“At first it was fascinating. I’d occasionally borrow the phone, hide somewhere and watch porn videos and when I got my own phone, it became much easier to access them,” he recounts.

Matt also couldn’t talk about it with anyone at first, until he learnt that his peers didn’t shy away from openly talking about it. He says that initially, it felt “weird” for him to talk about it with anyone, especially an adult.

But unlike Eva, Matt didn’t feel the negative effects of viewing pornographic material until “light shone on me,” by which he meant knowing God.

“I realised that my perception of women was improper and my sexual urge was out of control. Whenever I spoke with a girl, all I thought of was how I could manipulate her into having sex with me,” he recalls, adding that he had as many sexual partners as he could get.

For Matt, his parents aren’t entirely to blame for his early exposure to explicit content, but a little education on the subject could’ve curbed his nosiness and some discretion by his older friend could’ve been the ultimate saviour.

“I should have been warned about what was in that phone before I took it,” he says. “However, porn is way too easy to access these days that it can be difficult to protect curious children from it.”

As they recover from years of addiction, Matt and Eva contend that pornography use is not good for anyone and adults should do everything they can to protect children.

“I believe it is highly addictive and it negatively impacts one’s beliefs, especially about people of the opposite gender, and of sex. It also wastes money and time once someone becomes a frequent user,” notes Matt.

But what has been most appalling to both of them is the fact that so many people today watch pornography and most of them freely admit it thinking that it’s normal and okay. Is it, though?

Experts in psychology, sexology and medicine are yet to reach a consensus on whether pornographic content has any bad effects on the mental and sexual health of grown-ups, but its impact on children and adolescents has never been disputed.

According to Dr Wamathai, who is also the Dean of Students at the Utalii College in Nairobi, when children learn about sex from pornography, they are bound to emulate what they see in the videos, and that could have far-reaching effects in their lives and others’ as well.

“It gives the young people a very powerful sexual stimulus, leading to masturbation – which has its own negative effects. It can also lead to development of sexually aggressive behaviours and lack of restraint among young people,” she said.

“This way, the young men are likely to evolve into sexual predators, rapists, outright perverts or hypersexual, issues which later on affect their families, their significant others and sometimes even their children.”

Dr Wamathai’s research revealed that the main reasons for which children become frequent consumers of pornographic content were to satisfy curiosity and get more information about sex, yet the young people she interviewed said they didn’t talk about it with their parents or guardians.

According to her, the young people are not getting “age-appropriate” sexual education from adults at home and at school, pushing them learn from the internet, “because it’s only natural that young people would want to explore their sexuality.”

“Should we continue to look at this issue with subtlety among our people, its negative effects will continue to become more rampant, just as is the case with alcoholism and drug abuse today. So, our continued silence on this issue will not help,” Dr Wamathai notes.

Her research recommended implementation of policies that curtail and criminalise exposure of children to adult content, as well as the introduction of sex education in the country’s basic education curricula. However, her research might not have reached the country’s top brass as her proposals remain unimplemented.

The closest Kenya has gotten to protecting children from pornography is through the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act of 2018, which criminalised the intentional publishing, production, or distribution of child pornography.

However, the constitution also criminalises obscenity, the production or distribution of such material, but there is still no censorship of internet pornography or virtual private networks in the country.

According to the World Population Review, censoring pornographic websites is complicated for jurisdictions due to laws of freedom of expression, and medical organisations have not yet recognised pornography as a “true” addiction.

But there are tools available for parents and guardians to use in this digital age when having a smart phone may as well be children’s right, although available studies show that these tools are not fully utilised.

For instance, smart phones today come with parental control settings, which can enable parents to closely monitor what their children do with their phones and safety search settings which help keep children off dangerous websites online.

Psychologists also recommend that parents control their children’s screen time and occasionally check their browsing history, videos they watch or post online, and discuss with them about digital safety and hygiene.

However, a 2021 study by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky revealed that only 48 per cent of parents globally use parental control apps to monitor what their children do with their gadgets, and only 45 per cent check their children’s browsing history.

What’s more, the survey revealed, almost half of all parents globally leave their children to use gadgets alone without any form of censorship or monitoring and that at least a quarter of them believe that digital control is a responsibility they share with their children’s schools.

These point to a widespread problem of parental negligence, with children and teenagers paying the price without the knowledge of their parents, and as author James Ballard once said, it threatens the entire human existence.

In his 1979 collection of science fiction short stories “Myths of the Near Future” in which he told tales which today seem all too real, the English author wrote: “A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction,” signalling that pornographic content could indeed be the end of humanity, if nothing is done about it.

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