By Hermanus van Wyk (NSSCO)
WINDHOEK
It is true that modern technology in this age surely promotes sexual promiscuity amongst the youth.
With the click of a button our youth have immediate excess to pornography.
Pornography has long been widely available on the internet, through e-mail, chat rooms and websites offering graphic images and explicit videos.
Nowadays it’s not necessary to have access to explicit adult videos, but the easily available cellphones can also give you access to explicit adult pornographic images.
The problem lies in the number of young computer and cellphone users who, in surfing the wonders of the internet, increasingly find themselves stumbling into its distinctly sleazy side.
And the young people, curious as they are, are prone to experiment with what they see on the Internet. It goes without saying that these “experiments” result in our youth becoming a generation without decent sexual norms. The youth become sexually licentious.
Because of the easy access and the anonymity associated with using the internet, child pornography has become a major problem. Pornographic websites, especially child-porn websites, are illegal in Namibia, but the Internet has made it easy for perpetrators to find both clients and victims.
Anyone with a camera, basic computer equipment, a phone line and some know-how can set up their own websites. And because it’s so difficult to regulate the net’s content, both perpetrator and victim often get away with it.
It is extremely easy for our curious young people to get access to pornography online.
Not only are children often unwittingly exposed to internet pornography – for instance when they type a phrase into a search engine and a porn site comes up. File-sharing software connects computer users directly to one another so digital music and video files of one individual can be downloaded by another and so digital music and video files of explicit and vile pornography.
And, unlike on the Internet, where you generally need a credit card to access hard-core adult videos, using file-sharing programmes is free.
Furthermore, whereas the Internet porn sites can be blocked by installing parental-control software, there is no similar methods to block or control the use of file-sharing programmes.
Another culprit of modern technology is the easy available cellphones and their services and functions.
It is just as easy with a cellphone to get access to the Internet porn world.
Most cellphones do have integrated cameras, which the young people recently in Windhoek abused to produce a homemade pornographic video clip.
Teenagers are among the heaviest users of sharing Internet services, and it is these kids who are exposed, accidentally or intentionally, to pornographic files, which often have innocuous labels – seemingly innocent searches for files containing images of popular singers, actors and cartoon characters also produce many graphic pornographic images.
Remember that in the “old days” you didn’t find so many teenage pregnancies, nor did you see so much sexual promiscuity amongst our young people.
The new digital revolution with their so-called technological “wonders”, such as the Internet, digital web-enabled cellphones, DVDs promotes sexual promiscuity amongst our young people.
Our young people learn more from what they see, than from what they hear.
The mind can be compared with a water well. If we throw all kinds of rubbish into that well, we cannot expect to draw clean and healthy water from it.