Pornography is a problem, but it is not the biggest cancer we are facing

On Sunday, thousands of Rotarians and ‘well-wishers’ ran up and down the hills of Kampala and raised Shs740 million. The money will go towards a bunker at Nsambya Hospital, which is badly needed before a modern linear accelerator machine, donated by some Good Samaritans abroad, can be installed to treat cancer patients.
The next day, Ethics and Integrity minister Simon Lokodo, a man who would perhaps describe himself as all cloth and no flesh, swore in an anti-pornography committee armed with a Shs2 billion budget.
The problem here, of misplaced priorities coupled with misplaced citizen agency, is fairly straightforward, has been tackled in this column before, and is now a recurring theme; we shall return to it in the near future.
There is a lot to be said about which battles we choose to fight.

Had Fr Lokodo launched a committee to ensure smooth traffic flow in the city rather than throttle access to naughty websites, or launched a committee to stamp out fuel adulteration, he would have been seen in more heroic terms, and rightly so.
But even more interesting than which battles we choose is how we choose to fight them. Here let us digress for a minute.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a movement, spearheaded by the evangelicals in the United States of America spread across the world, inspiring teenagers and young adults to pledge to abstinence as a way to control the spread of sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies and general sexual immorality.
In beggar countries like Uganda, this movement manifested itself in public health policy where money from some key funders was diverted from tried-and-tested programmes, like the Abstain, Be faithful or use Condoms (ABC), to those that promoted only or primarily abstinence. Fused with local evangelicals, including some with close links to the top offices in the country, sex education texts were scrapped from the curriculum.
Children had no business learning about sex or being taught how to use condoms, went the argument.

They were expected to keep their bodies holy and pure, as temples of God, until they had received the holy sacrament of marriage.

The problem was that the policy makers chose to moralise, not analyse the problem. Cold hard facts gave way to religious mumbo-jumbo and emotion. It did not take long for the project to backfire.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University found that teenagers in the US, who pledged to remain virgins until marriage, were just as likely to have pre-marital sex as those who had not.
Furthermore, those who had put all their faith in their pledges were found to be significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they did jump into the sack.
In places like Uganda, it soon became clear that most new infections were taking place within marriages, not outside them.

Marriage wasn’t the panacea to sexually transmitted infections the policy promoters claimed it to be.

No one could publicly argue against the merits of young people abstaining before marriage in the same way few people would openly go around defending their right to watch pornography. However, public policy should be the outcome of a dispassionate and rational examination of facts, not dogmatic prescriptions of personal preferences. Here things become a bit ideological.
Do we see the Internet as a tool that brings both risks and opportunities but to which we must expand access and increase affordability or as a dangerous place teeming with miscreants, which we must police, allowing through only that we find acceptable to our worldview? And whose worldview should it be and who should control content and access? The government? ISPs? Parents? End users? Who should determine what is pornographic or not?

And if those in power choose to censor the parts of the Internet that they consider to be pornographic, how long before they decide which political or religious messages are acceptable, or which sites the public are allowed to access, or which thoughts and arguments are kosher?
At the end of the day, it is hard to dissect the Internet into its good and bad bits.

The adult entertainment industry, for instance, has content that is patently criminal, such as child porn, but it has also been a trailblazer in video-on-demand, electronic billing, affiliate marketing and all sorts of things that ‘legitimate’ businesses in media and entertainment are still struggling to master.
Inversely, as the Johns Hopkins study showed, while marriage had a lot of good things going for it, it was not the solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted infections.
Throttling the internet won’t make us any more moral or better behaved. To put it another way, pornography is potentially a problem, but it is not the biggest cancer we are facing.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.