October 15 and 16 my wife and I attended a conference at the Hilton Trinidad on pornography. Some of the world's experts were there as well as local experts and they spoke at the conference. It blew my mind because it revealed new research and very disturbing trends.
T&T is back in 2016 as the highest porn searcher on the Internet per capita in the world and we have still been in the top ten in the last four years. Research has been done which shows that countries that have made pornography illegal today have reduced murders, divorces, rapes, male and female domestic abuse, male and female assaults, paedophilia, incest, sexually transmitted infections, sexual violence and bullying in schools.
Making pornography illegal also improves the grades of students in schools and universities who are addicted to pornography. Research has also shown that pornography is more addictive than cocaine and one of my medical friends in one of the other Caribbean islands tells me that they have addicts who are addicted to both pornography and cocaine and their lives are in a mess. Other research has shown that young men in their teens and 20's are getting erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation from pornography.
One of the foreign speakers showed recent research about the development of the human brain which revealed that in fact the brain does not finish maturing until the person is in their early 20's and this makes children and teenagers particularly vulnerable to pornography. Another speaker revealed that the youngest child that was addicted to pornography and committed a sexual offence in the USA was four years old.
We are distressed here in T&T by the increases in murders of adults and children, rapes, male and female assaults and domestic abuse, paedophilia, violence in schools etc, and we appear to think that by increasing the numbers in the police service and army and moving them about like players in a chess game will decrease these problems.
We seem to have forgotten that in the first days of the PNM in 1956 Dr Williams made porn books, such as Playboy magazine, illegal in T&T and they were completely banned here. I remember this from my school days, so we can do it again if we want to do so by changing and enforcing the laws.
Unfortunately it now appears that in T&T pornography is regarded as a joke and is a macho or macha thing and adults actively encourage their children to participate in it, as I discovered when I went to give a lecture to a primary school a few years ago and found that some parents had given their children cell phones in that school with pornography already on them, so the SEA class was in a complete mess that year.
Recently Fr Martin Sirju, who is an RC priest, wrote an article about females being treated like dogs and buried in shallow graves because we apparently have so little respect for females in T&T, and a national newspaper spoke about the murder of Shannon who was the 45th woman to be murdered this year and how unsafe T&T was for women and children. But yet the pornography conference at the Hilton was practically ignored locally.
Women and teenagers disappear here regularly and you can see the trees and beaches of South America which are seven miles away from Moruga and yet we are denying that we have a human trafficking problem in T&T.
Finally, the sting in the tail. Because of microcephaly and other problems associated with the Zika virus, it has once more become fashionable to speak of legalising abortion in T&T. We are in the times of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and in view of some of the recent abuse and murders of children, I wanted to share some thoughts about Christmas and the unwanted child over the season.
Children may not be wanted by certain adults but are ardently wanted by others. The problem is less that of unwanted children than of wanting adults. Karl G Schmude says: "It becomes a chilling experience to ponder the feast of Christmas in the context of the present qualified valuation of human life, for there is no doubt that the conditions now decreed by many countries to be sufficient for abortion, attended Christ's birth.
"The physical circumstances surrounding the event were poor, smelly and unhygienic; the identity of the child's father was clouded; the child himself was born into a subject and embattled race which made his personal future decidedly hazardous.
"The Massacre of the Innocents involved the execution of the born; but as Malcolm Muggeridge suggested with horrifying penetration, 'the strong probability is that today we should be too humane to allow Christ to be born.'"
Dr Peter Gentle