Pornography consumption reported by high school students in Sancti Spíritus

High school students in Sancti Spíritus created private groups in WhatsApp to share pornography during the recently completed school year, according to authorities of that Cuban province.

“These students managed the groups and had the possibility of including or not including their teachers, whether they were their guide teachers, grade coordinator or the center director. The tendency, of course, was not to include them. In this way, they had a group to receive the content and information and their own group for other things, as was the case with pornography," he admitted to the official newspaper this Wednesday. Escambray the provincial deputy director of Education at Sancti Spiritus, Yosvany Rodriguez Herrera.

According to the report, in this province in the center of the country "several incidents of this type have occurred", although, he clarified, school regulations establish that cell phones or other mobile devices must be turned off during teaching and extra-teaching activities.

However, the official said, during the recently completed school year, high school students “took advantage of technologies to promote the consumption of pornography through social networks such as WhatsApp.”

According to Rodríguez Herrera, these cases were known through the family, because “the teacher does not have the power to check the student's device, because it is something for personal use,” and teachers are not included in these groups, therefore that “they don't know what happens there.”

"Once the school was aware of these events, it carried out an overall analysis with the family, where they recognized that, many times, they had not followed up on the boys' use of social networks in a timely manner," assured the director of Education in Sancti Spíritus, where 90% of the students have mobile devices and it is difficult for a single teacher to control the use of phones in the classroom.

According to Escambray, a recent survey in 13 Sancti Spiritus schools showed that the majority of students go to social networks in search of information about different subjects, to contact their families and get distracted, among other options.

Last June, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) presented in a study the numerous dangers for children and teenagers of accessing Internet services without control and supervision. These risks included gender stereotypes, violence, pornography, hate speech and reading false or false information. fake news.

Likewise, UNICEF pointed out that, after the pandemic and with the arrival of distance education, six out of every 10 adolescents on the planet sleep with their mobile phone, while one in five connects at night, in addition to 98.5% is registered on a social network.

The United Nations organization warned that they are becoming more common among lesser practices of sexting, which is the sending of messages, photos or videos of personal erotic and sexual content via mobile phone.

Other studies also recognize that pornography consumption among adolescents can encourage risky sexual behavior, since it can hinder their perception of intercourse, as it is associated with sexual permissiveness, aggressiveness, violence, sexual coercion and victimization.