The Chrisland School video

Recently, some ‘adventurous’ students of Chrisland School, Lagos, in faraway Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) where they had gone on an excursion, engaged in sexual immorality in their hotel room, recorded the scene and transmitted same for the whole world to view on the internet. Since then, the students, their parents and the school authorities have been in the eye of the storm. Not a few have besmirched the students’ image for being errant and worldly, their parents for poor quality parenting, and the school for culpable negligence. Perhaps what many have yet to accept is that the juveniles’ show of shame actually mirrors the level of decadence in the society.

Children, on a daily basis, hear of and see the atrocities that some undisciplined adults engage in as a result of low morals and warped value system, and they simply copy them. The mother of the girl at the centre of the morally reprehensible act brought this incident to the public domain as a rape case. However, without prejudice to police investigation, it is virtually evident from the video that the girl and her partner had consensual coitus. Indeed, going by the video, the girl was the more sexually active of the two and could actually be accused of the offence her mother was trying to pin on her partner and the witnesses. And the allegation that the girl was drugged before or during the sexual act can hardly hold because there was nothing in the video to suggest that she and her partner as well as the witnesses were not in charge of their cognitive capacity. It was simply yet another shame and embarrassment to the society.

While poor parenting might have contributed to children of impressionable ages becoming content material for a porn video as in the instant case, the misuse of advances in information and communication technology by juveniles, a situation over which many parents have limited control, is also a significant factor. Unlimited access by children to social platforms imbued with pornography, obscene adventures and scenes that insult human sensibilities are a dangerous exposure, and  sometimes children try to put them into practice when they are alone and unsupervised by adults. Again, uncouth utterances, indecent dressing and behaviour by parents are contributory factors to the perversion of the Nigerian value system and culture.

The school authorities too cannot exonerate themselves so easily as they are wont to, as they can hardly stand the scrutiny of the duty of care. While we note that the school authorities had put measures in place to oversee the activities of the students and to also checkmate their excesses, these, however, failed. Even if the children were morally rotten from their homes, for as long as they are under the school’s watch, it is the  duty of the authorities to ensure their safety and rein in aberrant behaviours by them through proper and effective monitoring.

The errant children, including those who were hailing the indecent behaviour, and especially those who filmed the incident and transmitted the same to the public, are all culprits. These children would need help by way of therapy to purge them of waywardness as they constitute a danger not just to the society but also to themselves. Perhaps it is important to mention that there is a criminal angle to the sex incident and some of the children may be in serious trouble should the Lagos State government decide to go the whole hog in prosecuting the case. Yes, the obscene sexual act by the somewhat precocious girl and her boyfriend may constitute no crime because they are minors but the production and transmission of images that depict sexually explicit content involving a child is a serious offence that carries a 14-year jail term upon conviction. In essence, the children who witnessed the sex binge, filmed and transmitted it but who ironically are yet to be seriously censored by members of the public, are the actual criminal suspects in the sex saga.

The entire sex scandal by a young schoolgirl and boy(s) is really disturbing both in terms of the embarrassment that it presents today and what it portends for tomorrow. It calls for serious and deliberate societal moral re-awakening and discipline.