#BAD: Pupils in Lagos schools turn classrooms to #Porn Centres

Dressed in their neat uniforms and looking prim for school, children are adorable and most parents don’t know what theirs are capable of behind their backs.

A few weeks ago, while a science class was going on in a public secondary school in Ikeja, Lagos, a pupil was sighted at the back of the class completely engrossed.

The teacher, noticing that the source of the pupil’s attraction was hidden under the desk, she moved closer to the pupil, who was still lost in another world.

Upon closer inspection, the teacher found out that the centre of the pupil’s attraction was his smart phone, on which two objects were locked in steamy sex.

“I seized the phone and what I saw shocked me. He was watching a sex video while class was going on. He was later suspended for two weeks,” the teacher said, with a note of anger.

Continue reading after the cut....

Investigation by Saturday PUNCH shows how pornography has become popular among public secondary school pupils in Lagos, thanks to internet-enabled phones.

Mobile phones have been banned among pupils in public secondary schools in the state. But that is only officially as pupils still go to school with their phones with the plan to hide them when their teachers are around.

Meanwhile, the popularity of pornography continues to grow on school premises with some pupils who interacted with our correspondent, describing the trend of watching porn videos and sharing them in school as “a normal thing” among them.

Interestingly, quite a number of male pupils admitted to visiting porn sites on their mobile phones. The trend is more common with male pupils, but some female pupils are now being influenced, according to the reports by school teachers.

At Oregun Senior High School, Ikeja, Lagos, a similar incident occurred a couple of weeks ago, when teachers were confronted with an awkward situation in the staff room.

One of the teachers had caught a pupil using his phone in class, also hiding behind his desk. The teacher seized the phone from the pupil only to realise that it had been locked.

On getting to the staff room and in the company of her colleagues, the teacher was finally able to unlock the phone, and the page that came up showed that the pupil had been watching a porn video in class.

The craze for porn videos in secondary schools seems to have hit a new high.

For instance, at Agidingbi Senior Grammar School, Ikeja, Lagos, a cross section of pupils estimated that up to 60 per cent of them were into watching porn, while at Ojodu Senior Grammar School, Ojodu, an estimated 40 per cent of the pupils had leaning towards it.

Largely, pupils get the porn videos by downloading them on their phones or getting them from colleagues willing to share.

A pupil of Agidingbi Senior Grammar School, Kayode Akinola, described pornography as very common among students in the school.

“Pupils download porn videos on their phones from the internet or get them by sharing with others via Bluetooth. Most times, during free periods or when a teacher is not in class, you see pupils gather round at the back of the class to watch porn videos on their phones.

“When they are watching the videos, you may hear comments like ‘this video is bad’ or ‘see how big this one (a private part) is’ and so on.”

Also, a pupil of Ojodu Senior Grammar School, Elizabeth Akpan, said that “boys usually make noise when they watch porn in class.”

Sources in schools say that only a few female pupils join their male colleagues in watching porn. Some female pupils who are too shy to openly watch porn videos favour what some of the pupils have described as equivalents, which include porn magazines and romance novels.

“Sometimes, it is when you collect a girl’s phone that you will see the videos there; they don’t go about showing them to people. In most cases, you tend to see more of nude pictures on girls’ phones than porn videos,” said a pupil of Ojodu Senior Grammar School, who identified himself as John.

Meanwhile, interactions with pupils from across different schools in Lagos show two categories of underage persons that fall into the habit of watching porn movies downloaded from the internet.

While one category of the pupils intentionally search for porn materials online, a second group innocently stumble on the materials online. Sadly, sources say that some of the pupils who fall under the second category get hooked and addicted to porn soon enough.

During our correspondent’s interaction with pupils from across different schools in Lagos, they reeled out over half a dozen websites as some of the famous destinations where they download porn videos without hassles.

Our correspondent visited one of the websites mentioned and found out that it offers a social utility service where various downloads, including songs, applications, e-books, nude pictures and porn videos could be done in less than five minutes.

To download a porn video, the website takes the visitor to its affiliate, which is strictly meant for such materials and the only hurdle put up to check that the interested party is not underage, requires that the visitor states that he or she is 18 years and above by clicking on a box to affirm the position.

Expectedly, pupils who admitted to have visited the porn site said they had no difficulty clicking that they had come of age.

“It’s really easy to stumble on the porn sites online even when you’re not looking for them, so the videos are so easy to get. My seven-year-old nephew who can browse (the internet) has stumbled on a porn site before and was asking me about the things he saw,” said Samuel Ojo, a 15-year-old pupil of Opebi Grammar School, Ikeja.

So far, the existing ban on the use of mobile phones by public secondary school pupils has failed to check the increasing but dangerous popularity of porn in schools. Pupils are able to escape being caught with mobile phones once they are put on silent mode and not used in the presence of their teachers.

In most of the schools, being caught with a mobile phone on the school premises attracts a penalty of two weeks suspension and a few schools also randomly search students’ bags. But none of the measures has effectively curbed the trend.

A teacher at Oregun Senior High School, Ikeja, who did not want his name published because he was not authorised to speak with journalists, has described the trend as a major threat to the teaching staff in the school.

Lagos State Government took a World Bank loan of $90m (over N14bn) about five years ago to improve education in its over 600 public secondary schools. Meanwhile, the Federal Government has just approved an additional N40bn World Bank loan for the state, to also be spent on education and infrastructure.

The source at Oregun High School said that more pressure has been put on secondary school teachers to justify the government investment in schools’ infrastructure.

He said, “But almost every week, we catch these pupils watching porn on their phones. Sometimes when we seize the phones and browse through in the staff room to see what the owners have been watching, we often realise that they are loaded with pornographic videos.

“This is one of the major things that don’t make the pupils concentrate in class. Such things distract the students and affect their performances. Meanwhile, the state government at some point was considering tying teachers’ salaries to their students’ general performance, not taking into consideration such distractions that we have no control over.”

A teacher at Ojodu Senior Grammar School said the school authorities were considering stiffer penalties for pupils caught watching or promoting porn on the school premises.

Currently, offenders in the school serve two weeks suspension and a week of additional punishment, which may require weeding and cutting of grass.

“We are considering introducing stiffer penalties because it’s easy to get addicted to porn and once a student is addicted, it becomes really hard to stop,” the teacher said.

The source suggested that telecoms companies should censor the use of the internet, particularly for underage persons, using the information supplied during SIM card registration.

The dangers

A professor of Education at the Lagos State University, Ojo, Demola Onifade, said the trend posed grave dangers to pupils.

According to him, one of the dangers is that adolescents are adventurous and like to experiment.

He said, “The chances are that they will want to practise what they see and that is the danger with adolescents. The other problem is that in practising it, they are exposed to so many dangers. They could contact sexually transmitted diseases and if not well treated, such diseases can ruin the future of some of them. For instance, a female pupil can have a problem with her ovary and be unable to bear children.”

Indeed, in some of the schools, pupils have occasionally been caught in pairs making out in secluded spots.

A teacher at Agidingbi Senior Grammar School recalled that the school “decisively dealt with a couple of pupils recently caught in compromising positions.”

“The male and female pupils were found kissing and caressing each other on the premises. They were called out during the assembly and flogged. In addition, they were suspended from school for two weeks. And that is not the only case we have had here,” he said with some measure of regret.

Onifade added that the trend could also sway students’ focus away from their academic studies.

“Whereas at that age, all they need is 100 per cent attention to their studies. Again, such pupils might influence their siblings negatively and it will be a vicious cycle,” he added.

Onifade called for stiffer control on the use of phones by underage persons, suggesting that computer laboratories should rather be provided for them in schools under strict monitoring by teachers.

He said, “As a matter of fact, I believe that secondary school pupils should not be allowed to use phones. If the pupils are able to sneak phones into the schools, it means that the authorities are not efficient. Schools can have computer laboratories and the use of the computers should be monitored by teachers. That way, pupils can’t do anything they like on the system.”

In his reaction, the President, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, Mr. Lanre Ajayi, suggested that government could “technically checkmate the issue by involving service providers.”

He said, “It will involve the service providers installing some filters in their systems, which will block the sites. But it will require extensive work and some privacy advocacy may also oppose it because they may consider it as infringing on the rights of people who want access to things that are of interest to them.”

Ajayi said that blocking porn sites for underage students alone would be “too complex because how do you know that the person using the phone is a pupil, except they are accessing the internet within their school premises?”

“In China, some sites are blocked, including porn sites and they are not accessible to their citizens. But where they are blocked, it won’t be limited to the students but to the general public. However, computers have softwares, which when installed, can limit or control the sites that users visit. There should be such softwares for mobile phones too.”

When our correspondent called the State Commissioner for Education, Mrs. Olayinka Oladunjoye, a man who answered the phone on her behalf, asked our correspondent to see the ministry’s public relations officer for further direction.

“Come to the ministry and see the PRO, he will guide and direct you to who will talk to you. Thank you,” he said.

But in a phone conversation with Saturday PUNCH, the State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Lateef Ibirogba, said that government would change its strategy of monitoring school pupils to check the growing trend.

He said, “It shows that we should take a second look at the social media because it’s a reflection of the ills of the social media. We will look into it and change our strategy of monitoring the pupils because it shows that we need to monitor them more.

“We agree that children are adventurous, but they must not be exposed to such things and get distracted. We will up our game and curb the trend.”

-Punch

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