From: People For Peace
Colleagues Home & Abroad Regional News
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
KAREN-NAIROBI
On Pentecost Sunday Mrs Rosemary Kuria, a mother and a writer told military families at Resurrection Gardens in Karen that parents are to blame for children getting access to pornographic materials through internet, TV among other sources.
Introducing her 4 children during the talk, Mrs Kuria said that as a good and role model parent she makes sure which programmes they watch. She claimed that she has mastered all the bad programmes. That is why those days she is to take the circuit fuse with her so that children cannot get access to such movies.
What Mrs Kuria probably doesn’t know even about her own children is the fact that in the 21st century, these sites are there with our children and will always be with them. The only way we can help them is how to live with them positively.
Even in India where sexual immorality used not to be a problem last century, today parents cannot control their children anymore. Premarital sex in Indian culture was almost non-existence those days. In Indian children are now able to read sexual novels, stories, watch pornographic films, through poems, writings, sculpture and paintings etc.
Unlike before, today sexual explicit magazine, pornographic movies are freely available to the youth. And with internet opening the door to pornographic material to virtually everyone-everywhere, we shall be pretending that taking away fuses or computers with us would help our children.
It explains why for most parents it became like a shock when hundreds of teenagers attending middle and high schools throughout Washington were convicted of felony sex crimes last week where public records show that one particular junior high student was convicted of sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl.
According to KIRO Team 7 Investigators exclusive research at least 412 registered sex offenders in Washington are under the age of 18. Of those children convicted of sex crimes, 234 are 16 years old or younger.
Shocking news was yet in last year October 27 when the boys, aged 10 and 11, were cleared of the more serious charge of raping the victim in Hayes, west London. According to prosecutors two boys took the girl first to the third floor of an apartment block where they exposed themselves, and then helped each other to carry out the assault, with some carried out in an elevator at a block of apartments and in a rubbish room.
The boys were cleared of rape after the girl said she lied about being raped and admitted she was voluntarily with the boys, both aged 10 at the time of the incident and that she enjoyed it as well.
Giving evidence through a video link on May 13 to London’s Old Bailey court, in cross-examination by the defence counsel the girl said she lied to her mother because she was “naughty” and was worried she would not get any lollies.
Countries like Kenya any sexual activity with a girl who has not turned 18 years of age is considered rape even if the girl said she consented. It explains why in Kenya the boys could have not been cleared of rape.
Like London in Canada, the legal age of consent is 16, with a close-in-age exception that allows 14- and 15-year-olds to consent to sexual activity with people up to five years older. It means that having sex with girls between these ages are not an offense provided she consented.
Despite the fact that in Kenya the girl can only consent when she has turned 18 years of age, thousands of young Kenyans girls are being driven into modern slavery abroad in their desperate attempts to escape from worsening economic conditions at home.
According to media investigations nearly 20,000 Kenyans fall prey to human trafficking cartels yearly and are living in appalling conditions in North America, Europe and the Middle East. The best example is the case of a 14-year-old girl who was rescued in the United Kingdom last year. She had been moved to Liverpool by a man who locked her in a house and forced her to have sex with numerous people.
One thing is that these teenagers are not forced to be trafficked they go there willingly with one intention to get their living. It doesn’t matter in which way, whether through prostitution, lap dance, strip or pole dance.
It explains why a survey in Nairobi last year cyber cafes found an overwhelming number of youth scanning their photos and uploading them to dating websites such as Match.com and Adultfriendfinder.com. The aim is to get elderly rich white men from Europe and America.
Occasionally when some of the foreign men come to Kenya to visit their newly found girlfriends they leave and continue sending them a lot of money that is why most women across Nairobi are able to rent expensive apartments, buying the latest mobile phones, drive expensive cars and drink in expensive pubs. Some women or teenagers whose new boy friends through the web cannot make it to Kenya make arrangements how they can go there.
Even though it could be argued that Kenya’s economy is growing so fast, it cannot provide jobs to its youth. That is why hundreds of thousands of young people do not only join the labor market from universities, colleges, high schools and grade school, they are forced to spend much time online not with bad intention but simply how to survive.
I wish parents like Mrs Kuria could read Tancer’s book Click, subtitled What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters. They will be shocked to find out what the Internet reveals about young people and adults in general.
To their surprise they will find out that what their children are visiting online are not so much pornographic sites. His research has revealed that the number of young people driven to pornography has declined as more of them join social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace, and the video-sharing site YouTube.
Although there are some few cases where some young people go on pornographic lines, according to the research most of them do so because they were lonely and unhappy, especially the way their parents or relatives treat them. The good news however is that Facebook has partly solved that problem for them.
According to Tancer’s finding even those young people who are driven to pornography they are just doing so for curiosity. They would like to find out how to “kiss”, while for boys questions like “how to find a girlfriend” and “how to flirt with girls”.
All these are not bad intentions and instead of parents being afraid they can take it from here to talk to their children on disadvantages and advantages of kissing, being with a girlfriend or boyfriends.
Most young people are driven on Facebook because this is the site where they meet new friends where they can chart freely. For them creating new friends is the most consoling.
Although according to Mrs Kuria the government should step in to ban pornographic sites and also control media, to ensure that what they are showing, broadcasting or writing are not pornographic in nature, in countries where such steps have been taken have proven to be the worst.
In Botswana where pornography is banned in all forms, it is one of the countries in Africa where HIV/ Aids are spreading like fire. Many people have died and are still dying that is why the government is now relying on foreigners to take up jobs which could be taken by citizens themselves.
In Botswana it is illegal to be found in possession of prohibited goods which include “Indecent and obscene material such as pornographic books, magazines, films, videos, DVDs and software”. Other countries that such regulations have been enforced but have become not shown any improvement include China and Saudi Arabia among others.
People for Peace in Africa (PPA)
P O Box 14877
Nairobi
00800, Westlands
Kenya
E-Mail news@ppa.or.ke
Tel 254-20-4441372
Website : www.peopleforpeaceafrica.org