A grade 10 pupil from the Western Cape is frantically trying to prevent a nude picture of himself he sent to a “girl” from being circulated on social media.
The 16-year-old plucked up the courage to inform his teachers of the image after the user of the seemingly fake account, whom he had interacted with on Instagram for months, threatened to distribute it if he did not send videos of himself involved in sexual acts with others.
On Thursday, the teenager’s parents sought the assistance of a professional company to track the perpetrator and intercept and remove the image before it could be shared.
Digimune, a company specialising in the protection and monitoring of social media networks, confirmed that the boy’s parents had enlisted its services, and that in other cases it had removed about six “compromising” images of pupils from social network sites.
Educational psychologist Anel Annandale and child protection expert Luke Lamprecht say there was a spike in cases of children and teenagers getting addicted to porn when the country went into lockdown during the pandemic.
Kerryn Giles, an educational psychologist based in Joburg, said the youngest patient she had treated for porn addiction was eight.
Annandale, based in Cape Town, said she had received two calls a week during the pandemic compared to six to seven calls a year before April 2020.
Lamprecht, the head of advocacy at Women & Men Against Child Abuse, said he was seeing at least one case a week of porn addiction compared to one a month before the pandemic.
Cases he has dealt with from February to April included:
- a 12-year-old surfing the internet for porn who was inadvertently drawn into a site where he saw images of infants being raped;
- a 14-year-old who was nabbed for taking photos up girls’ skirts at school because of his porn addiction;
- a 12-year-old girl who was sent pornographic images and pestered to mimic the “disgusting” material she was sent; and
- an 11-year-old who, while playing a popular action-adventure game, inadvertently started googling strip clubs and prostitutes.
He said the 11-year-old, a “tiny” grade six boy from Durban who hasn’t reached puberty, was addicted to gaming and this “directly led to watching porn”.
Lamprecht said that there was “a set of interceding problems and the most important one is that children have basically replaced sex education with pornography”.
“There has been a lack of healthy sex education delivered by well-trained people. It has resulted in children using pornography as a way to understand sexual development.”
There has been a lack of healthy sex education delivered by well-trained people. It has resulted in children using pornography as a way to understand sexual development.
— Luke Lamprecht, head of advocacy at Women & Men Against Child Abuse
Commenting on the incident involving the pupil who sent the nude photo, he said the learner, who is “enormously embarrassed”, sent it because he believed he had been communicating with a girl his age.
“There was a profile with a profile picture so you assume that that picture is that person’s.”
Lamprecht said the boy was asked to produce three videos, adding: “This is criminal because you are essentially soliciting sexual content from a teenager.
“Schools are increasingly calling me with concerns about the addiction that children are developing for porn and how that’s affecting their behaviour.”
Annandale said her patients came from good homes where the parents put a lot of safety nets in place to monitor their children’s internet usage.
“Many of them [patients] would say they don’t know why they watched it. The theme with all of them was that they couldn’t stop watching it. There’s also a lot of guilt that comes with watching porn.”
Charlie Mansel-Pleydell, a sex and porn addiction therapist in Sandton, said children and teens were watching porn because “it has become so freely accessible”.
“It’s not regulated and doesn’t come with a warning sign. We have got a real epidemic on our hands.”
He said “it’s terribly shameful for children and teenagers to approach their parents to say ‘I picked up a problem with porn’, so the shame they feel perpetuates the problem”.
Mia Boon, an educational psychologist in Cape Town, said she had treated “probably three” youngsters for porn addiction since the start of the pandemic.
“The youngest I treated for porn addiction was 10. The children often attempt the sex they see on the phone with one another.”
Durban educational psychologist Nicola Buhr said watching pornography could increase teenagers’ levels of guilt depending on cultural and religious beliefs.
Giles said they had treated “quite a few” children for porn addiction since July 2020.
“We know that viewing pornography can produce dopamine [the ‘feel good’ chemical] and that sustained viewing can result in the child craving that release, causing them to seek out such content.”
But sex expert Marlene Wasserman said there was “a tremendous amount of childhood neglect and abandonment and porn gets them to feel connected with each other and to themselves”.
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