Growing addiction among teens to Internet porn

In the middle of the night, 10-year-old Melissa* got up and thought she was dreaming but she quickly realized her 20-year-old brother was at it again, groping her and beckoning her to have sex with him another time. It had been going on since she was four. "Tomorrow, I'm telling my mother about this, I have to," she thought to herself.

She told her mother about the abuse. There were no words between them after that. Three weeks later, her brother moved out of the rented apartment in Curepe. Her mother just didn't want to talk about it and hasn't, up to now.

So Melissa, 18, has kept her subsequent addiction to pornography a secret all these years.

Her brother never forced her to do anything but she says she was just too young to understand what she was doing. The sexual experiments started first at the babysitter's and continued every year in primary school, then to secondary school, with boys, with girls, in the bathroom, on lunch break, whenever.

Back then she had no access to pornography but she was so aware of sex. She started looking for any opportunity she could get to do it. Last year, to help her prepare for CAPE, her mother, a geriatric nurse working the night shift, bought her a laptop.

Her mom is just never around. She leaves for work around four, the same time her daughter gets home from school. And even if she were, she doesn't know the first thing about computers so Melissa doesn't even bother to clear her history. Nor does she have to hide in her bedroom. Most of the time everything goes down right there in the living room.

A devout Christian, Melissa says her faith does not stop her from 'Googling' the raunchiest porn the web has to offer. She wished it would. She wished Jehovah Himself would stop her. She's been hooked for a long time and nothing, it seems, can break the habit.

She tried telling a couple elders at her church. No help there. She tried staying off the Net but any homework assignment or facebook chat could turn into three or four solid hours of porn watching, especially since she hates being alone. He father, she says, left her for another family.

"I can't begin to describe how much the whole craving for sex is. I don't know how to begin to get that out of me, I really don't know, I...

"Is almost as if to live any other life is impossible. It's frustrating because I'm trying to reach this place in my relationship with God and, um, it's basically like OK, yuh try and probably like for a month, if even a month, ah mean a month is like yay, victory for me, even if I reach that level and I make a mistake again — and I don't even know if to call it a mistake anymore — because I consciously know I have this problem but I just don't feel like trying anymore."

Melissa is one of a growing number of teens who are addicted to Internet pornography and feel there is no way out.

Anna-Marie*, 16, says her ordeal started when she was just three or four. Not one, but two relatives took turns molesting her until one day in standard three she started crying in class because of pain she was feeling "down there."

— Her mother was called in.
— The abuse stopped.
— Her addiction began.

"Because I was being interfered with and it all suddenly stopped, I felt like something was missing, something I felt before that I got accustomed to. Because of this, I needed to find ways of filling that void inside of me. That is how I was then introduced to porn."

In a recent poll on TheStudentPressDigital.com 110 out of 188 respondents, presumably teenagers, said they looked at porn. Surprisingly, up to press time, girls — not boys — were the main culprits.

A senior guidance officer at a secondary school along the east-west corridor spoke with The Student Press off the record and said there is a trend toward children looking at porn from a surprisingly early age. Girls, she noticed, have become the aggressors.

"I would have form ones in my school who would tell me they have viewed pornography already even in primary school. They view it on cell phones and we have a couple instances of them doing movies."

She also confirmed what many teenage porn addicts know well:
—Even teens who do well academically struggle with addiction to porn making it very easy to hide from teachers and parents.
—There is a correlation between children who are abused and those who get hooked on porn. Children like Melissa. Five 1s, three 3s in CAPE. And seven years of steady porn cravings.

Google Insights for Search, the software tool the giant web company uses to see what the world is searching for, ranks Trinidad and Tobago number one for most porn searches per capita ahead of the UK, Zimbabwe, the USA and Canada.

In June this year, China, the country with the world's largest population of Internet users — around 298 million — took a bold step to block Google.com, the world's most popular search engine, because it was serving up too much porn to Chinese citizens. It also blocked YouTube.com and Twitter.com, sites which are favourites for many teens.

CNN reported on August 14 on its website that "China announced earlier this year that it planned compulsory installation of the Green Dam Youth Escort software, ostensibly meant to protect young online users from pornography."

Krishna Raj Kumar, Executive Manager, Security and Assurance at the just-formed iGov TT, a State-owned company under the Ministry of Public Administration, said government is actively looking at the issue of teens and internet porn, starting with an aggressive public awareness campaign aimed at students and their parents.

Legislation has also been drafted to address the issue.

"We now have a cyber crime committee via [Ministry of] national security; we have several other initiatives aimed toward different avenues, so some of them may be technical, some of them legislative, some of them social," Raj Kumar said.

And while it is possible even today to access porn on many school computers, Raj Kumar said an initiative was currently under way to strengthen all school networks and sensitize students at the same time.


See page 14 of Digital Edition
* Names changed to protect students' identities

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