EDUCATION-SRI LANKA: Smut Glut Hits Schools

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Sep 29 1998 (IPS) - A high school student buys several sleazy Sinhala language magazines thrust through the gate during interval. He pores over the steamy picture-stories, shares them with friends and stocks them in a safe place at home.

A school bus driver regularly halts at a particular shop in downtown Colombo and buys his weekly fix of sexually explicit picture stories. Later he exchanges his material with other drivers or even passes it on to the children he drives to and from school.

These picture storybooks – a copy costing a mere US 30 cents are available freely all over the country. In other parts of South Asia pornographic books and magazines are usually available only to ‘select’ customers at roadside bookstalls.

The high school student was found to have more than 1,000 publications stashed away for ‘future reference.’ His was one example cited by a former director of non-formal education, P. Weliwita, at a recent brainstorming session on the exploitation of women and children through pornography.

Weliwita told delegates at the session organised by the National Committee on Women (NCW) that he had met over 800 children who said they not only had access to such reading material but were even trying what they read.

Now many of the children have, at the flick of a button, access to a whole new world in the form of videos and the Internet. With it comes the danger of pornographic material being widely disseminated through the electronic media.

Hearing that there are about 7,000 porn sites on the Internet, NCW Chairperson Dr. Wimala de Silva related how she had told a young friend of hers, ‘Soon it will come to Sri Lanka,’ only to be told, ‘It has already come.’

Her young friend explained that she knew of an enterprising schoolboy who was earning ‘pocket money’ renting cassettes with pornographic stuff downloaded onto them to his classmates.

The fallout of pornographic material being freely available, says Secretary in the Women’s Affairs Ministry, Kamala Wickramasinghe, includes a recent increase in crimes against women and children.

“Otherwise, how can you explain such incidents as a grandfather raping his little granddaughter?” she asked. Sri Lankan newspapers, particularly the Sinhala language ones, are full of stories of rape or incest by young and old men, with victims ranging from girls as young as five years to grandmothers aged 60 or over.

Wickramasinghe blames the media for its ‘pungent’ reporting of stories and for being unsympathetic to women, particularly rape victims.

She said docotrs who recently interviewed adolescents in the North Western Province on what they read, most youngsters replied ‘murders, suicides and rape.’

According to veteran film producer and director Tissa Abeysekera, when it comes to the definition of obscenity and pornography, “we are trapped in a twilight world.”

Referring to the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, he said, “when sexual activity and oral sex in their salacious detail are being broadcast and telecast into our sitting rooms, we cannot shut out the need to deal with subjects like pornography.”

Citing the examples of Khajuraho (the beautiful ancient erotic sculptures in India) and even the recent Indian film, ‘Kama Sutra,’ he asked, “Are they obscene or are they works of art? Are they good, are they bad? Where do you draw the line? What offends? What is within the bounds of permissible conduct?”

Abeysekera says there are two aspects to child porn –the use of children in the production of graphic material for the gratification of adult desires and the exposure of children to depraved material.

He said, while in Germany recently, he was shocked to learn that 60 per cent of the pornographic material downloaded from the Internet is from South Asia, with the bulk from Sri Lanka.

Video technology, he said, gave free rein to the pervert and facilitated a roaring sex trade. Now the digital revolution has completely erased cultural boundaries and inhibitions. “Therefore, the question of pornography has to be viewed in the modern environment,” he stressed.

There are laws to combat pornography but the problem seems to be in their implementation, Justice Ministry Additional Secretary Dhara Wijayatilleke said.

Police claim a shortage of manpower in making serious efforts to curb the sale of pornographic material on the streets of Colombo. Sociologists say exisiting laws in any case prescribe punishment too small to discourage vendors.

The same applies to pornographic movies that are shown to small audiences at some locations in Colombo. Occasional police swoops on these places and roadside bookstalls get wide publicity but are getting rarer and rarer.

Wijayatilleke, conceded that Sri Lanka was a major source for child-porn literature in the western markets and said the Internet posed a serious problem because detection and prosecution are difficult.

“We are in the preliminary stages of drafting computer crime laws,” she said.