Here a porn, there a porn. Your child too could be reading porn. Kumudini Hettiarachchi reports

The katha of chithra katha

By Kumudini Hettiarachchi

A Grade 11 student of a leading school in Negombo buys several Sinhala magazines and papers, through the bars of the gate, during the interval. He pores over the "chithra katha" (picture stories), shares them with some of his friends and stocks them on the ceiling of his home, climbing on to the roof through a gap in the toilet.

A school van driver from Piliyandala stops at particular places in Nawala and buys three papers weekly.

The ritual is to read them, meet up with eight other drivers and exchange his "chithra katha" with them. Sometimes they also share this "reading" material with the children they take to and from school.

My first thought was that it was good that the reading habit was increasing in Sri Lanka.

The student in Negombo had read over a 1,000 publications and stored them safely for future reference, like our parents would do with the classics. How good too that the school van drivers were reading, exchanging and even sharing with children, inculcating the reading habit among the young.

What were these children and men absorbing so interestedly?

Soft and hard pornographic material in the form of "chithra katha" - explicit details of perverted sexual fantasies, with sickening pictures. Dozens, nay hundreds and thousands, a copy costing a mere Rs. 20, available freely all over the country.

These were just two examples highlighted by a former director of non-formal education, P. Weliwita, at a recent brainstorming session on the exploitation of women and children through pornography and how to prevent it. The session was organised by the National Committee on Women (NCW).

Mr. Weliwita has met 800 children who have access to such reading material and are even practising what they read.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The danger lies not only from reading material. Now children have, with the flick of a button, a whole new world in the form of videos and the Internet. With it also comes the danger of pornographic material disseminated through the electronic media.

Hearing that there are about 7,000 porno web-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 had explained how a schoolboy was earning "pocket money" lending cassettes with porno stuff copied on them to his classmates.

Pin-pointing the fallout of porno material being freely available, Women's Affairs Ministry Secretary Kamala Wickramasinghe said the increase in crimes against women and children could be one. "Otherwise, how can you explain such incidents as a grandfather raping his little grand-daughter?" she asked.

Mrs. Wickramasinghe, harking back to the sixties, said at that time the most gruesome murder was the infamous Adeline Vitharne case. (In this case young Adeline Vitharne a village lass was seduced by Ananda Godage, a teacher, with promises of marriage. When she was pregnant for the second time and was adamant that he keep his promise, he drugged her, put her on the road and drove his car over her unconscious body, killing her, on the Puttalam-Anuradhapura Road. The police, in a marvellous Sherlock Holmes investigation arrested him and got him tried. In a sensational trial in Anuradhapura he was sentenced to death).

Now there are numerous "Adeline Vitharne" cases, lamented Ms. Wickramasinghe, partly also blaming the media for the "pungent" way of publishing stories and for being unsympathetic to women, particularly rape victims.

She backed her allegations with the findings of several doctors who had interviewed adolescents in the North Western Province on what they read. Their answer had been, "Marapu eva, divi nasa genim" (Murders and suicides).

This problem has been revealed, reflected, proscribed and even prescribed. But when it comes to children, it is a completely different thing, he said.

As Mr. Abeysekera puts it clearly and succinctly: 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.

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

The greater danger now is pornographic material sent through the electronic media. How do you detect? How do you prosecute? The urgent need was an onslaught in the form of making both children and parents aware of the problem. Censorship was not the answer. Creating strong healthy public opinion was the only way out, Mr. Abeysekera said.

The laws to combat pornography are in place. The problem seems to be implementation, Justice Ministry Additional Secretary Dhara Wijayatilleke said.

Agreeing that Sri Lanka was providing the largest quantum of child-porn literature to the western market, she touched on all the laws dealing with detecting, arresting and preventing the problem.

Mrs. Wijayatilleke said the bigger problem was the Internet. Detection and prosecution are difficult. "We are in the preliminary stages of drafting computer crime laws."

Detailing the various kinds of duties of the police, ranging from arresting illicit fellers and poachers, checking on unhygienic eateries during cholera epidemics, fighting the war to accompanying politicians in various areas, former Senior Deputy Inspector General of Police (Crimes), Gamini Gunawardena said they had limited resources and manpower. They were compelled to prioritise their work and some areas got marginalised.

There was no social awareness about pornography. Without putting the whole burden on the police, some kind of body should be set up to look after "public morals," he suggested.

DIG Gunawardena said he has proposed that a unit should also be set up within the Police Department to look into the problem of pornography.During the discussion that followed Visakha Vidyalaya Principal Nalini Edussuriya said the staff carried out random checks in the school for porno material. She had not realised that the problem was so acute.

This new trend in Lankan society of leaving children to their own devices could lead them astray easily. Some children had rooms of their own in their homes and parents did not know what they were up to. The other problem was that the children of working parents were left with domestic help. These people had no control over them. Sometimes they even lured children into wrongdoing, she added.

Combat it

* Make teachers and parents aware of the magnitude of the problem and the need for constant vigilance of their children

* Introduce sex education in schools, so that children are not left in the dark about their own bodies, with temptations to have a peek at porno material on this "taboo" subject

* Alert children to the dangers of reading or viewing depraved material with regard to completely normal yearnings and feelings experienced during puberty

* Create social awareness, without censorship so that the people themselves become the censors and say a resounding "No", to filthy and obscene material, be it in print or on video.

More Plus * Wake up to stunning scenes, call of birds

Return to the Plus Contents