Nigerian Schoolchildren Connect with Porn

In the 1960s, a MIT professor developed a conceptual environment where children from developing nations could learn how to learn. This learning learning equation served as the catalyst for the One Laptop Per Child Organization that set as its mission to deploy laptops to thousands of children from developmentally impoverished Nigeria on the African continent. A noble and inspiring goal, the organization recently experienced its biggest disappointment. As opposed to losing funding or government concerns, the One Laptop Per Child program was embarrassed and disturbed when they found out that Nigerian children using the laptops had not only viewed but downloaded pornographic material.

Globally, there are almost two billion children leaving at or beneath the poverty line. This trend is going to continue as the population of third world and developing countries continues to skyrocket. Whereas in the US where seventy-five hundred dollars is spent annually per child on education. Most of these underprivileged countries spend less than twenty dollars on educating their young. With that amount of money being multiplied many times over, it still would not be sufficient to equip kids in Africa and Asia to tap into their potential and be a part of the solution of the problems plaguing their nation.

One Laptop Per Child, also known as OLPC does not see itself as the savior of the kids who they have distributed laptops to. What they do hope is to provide an environment and learning situation that broadens the minds and develops the thinking capacity of kids who receive the laptops. These machines, developed and field tested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) partners in several nations, cost significantly less than a typical machine cost in the US today. In fact, the cheapest new machine you will find at your local Wal-Mart is going to cost you around five hundred dollars. These learning learning machines have been deployed at a cost of only one hundred dollars. Otherwise, it would be unfeasible and impractical for some a mission to be undertaken.

With a mission to help alleviate a global crisis, it is no surprising that the wind was knocked out of the sails at the non-profit One Laptop Per Child organization. As opposed to delving deeper into the world via their laptop screens, kids perused the pages of websites that were not apart of the intent of the project. While the responsibility falls at least partially on the organization who failed to install filtering software on the laptops, some burden of accountability must fall at the feet of the prying eyes of the Nigerian kids who used their laptops against the policies of the One Laptop Per Child project.

In looking at pornography, the US National Institute of Child Health says that when children watch or are exposed to sex and pornography, it escalates the age at which a child begins to develop the mental capacity and inclination to experiment sexually. It is estimated that upwards of two-thirds of males and over forty percent of females expressed an interest in modeling some of the behaviors they witnessed via pornography.

With such dire predictions, the US legal entities began to take a harder stance on pornography. In fact, NBC has a series on its Dateline broadcast entitled, To Catch a Predator, in which a sting is set up in different parts of the country to catch sexual predators of children. The show unfortunately never seems to run out of new predators to catch. Part of the reason To Catch a Predator even has programming is because of the growing number of kids who are becoming sexually active. And that activity is coming in some measure because of exposure to pornography.

With the project driven by providing children an opportunity to network and connect with a world beyond their wildest imagination, the team at One Laptop Per Child has some critical decisions to make for the sake of the future of the program. They have decided not to shut the program down and install filter software but beyond that, there are a percentage of the students today who have been exposed to sex and sexual activity like they never have before. And unfortunately, One Laptop Per Child has some cleaning up to do to ensure that the percentage of follow-up behavior experienced in the US is not replicated in Nigeria. If they do not, a wave of teenage sexual activity could drown the project and any hopes Nigeria has of building a new future for itself.