25/05/2009 (GMT+7)
VietNamNet/ANTG
VietNamNet Bridge – Google Trends is a site that tracks the search habits of Google users worldwide. In September and October 2008, Vietnam topped on Google Trend for searching orders of key word with “sex”.
This is a “shock”: Vietnam was not among the top ten countries for searching on “sex” on Google in 2005-2007. As of 2008, however, Google Trends reports that Vietnamese users had vaulted the country to fourth, third and then to the first position, ahead of Egypt and India.
Nobody can deny the benefits of the Internet, but the above statistic must worry us. Clearly, a segment of Vietnamese users go online to satisfy their addiction to sex, not for studies and research.
If they can’t visit the sex sites, why surf?
That is the statement of many young people about their habit of using the ‘Net as a means to satisfy their sex addiction. They browse the Internet only to only search for websites about sex.
The black website named “Mocxi”, which was closed recently, was familiar to many young people. This site had a huge number of members. However, this is not the only Vietnamese language sex site.
Probably I will never forget my astonishment and dismay when I interviewed a schoolboy at the Hanoi Vocational Training Boarding School. The boy, Thanh, was tall and handsome, with a fair complexion. He’d been sent to this school for naughty children after being convicted of robbery at the age of 13.
Thanh talked to me about sex in a very easy manner and when I asked him where he learnt about sex, he smiled ironically, mocking my naivete.
Before joining this boarding school, Thanh’s life was not at home, but at an Hanoi alley named Tu Do. He said he spent nights at an Internet café in Tu Do alley surfing sex websites. He knew all the sex sites and learned all sexual techniques from them. He robbed to have money to “practice’. He said his girlfriend is his own age, also a 7th grader.
Thanh said the girl was also very pure at the beginning. After being “taught” by Thanh, she became a sex addict like him, who could spend the whole day and night at the Internet café in Tu Do alley with websex.
It is not just juvenile delinquents like Thanh who are addicted to websex, but also plenty of normal boys and girls, youngsters who have never committed crimes nor run away from home to live like uncared-for children.
A high-school student in Hanoi told me that he and his friend used to search for websex sites. They didn’t have to go to Tu Do alley but visited sex sites at their homes.
“I’ve never gone to Internet cafes. My mother drives me to school and my father brings me home. While sitting at my desk, I surf on websex. My parents think I am studying,” the boy bragged.
“My parents think I am obedient, so they have just gave me a new laptop,” he said.
“Aren’t you afraid that your parents may learn about your activities?” I asked.
He smiled and said: “How can they know? They know nothing about the Internet. If they knew, I would have had to click off the site,” the boy said.
Yes, just a click, and all those terrible and shameless pictures disappear. They will be immediately replaced by healthy sites, which may cause pride to surge in the hearts of the parents. They may go to their office and boast to their colleagues that their kids are hard-working, so zealous that they studied the whole night on their computers.
The above boy said his friends did the same. If they didn’t, they would be mocked as “peasants”.
Once they find “good” sex clips, the youngsters send them to each other via Yahoo Messenger. One gets a reputation as a “pro” if they have “good” sex clips. Sex has become a great concern in their minds.
The boy confessed that he was obsessed by sex and so were his friends. He said he read an article about sex addiction and he was afraid that he was addicted to sex.
Psychologists say that through such occupation in websurfing, sex can become an uncontrollable obsession. The surfers are ruled by their instinct. They will not have any good dreams and aspirations, but only think of satisfying base sexual desires.
I asked the boy “Do you worry? He honestly answered “Yes, but I can’t escape from it”.
Heart-breaking consequences
There are a lot of bad consequences of sex addiction. The most painful and obvious are criminal cases.
The public was stunned by the rape and murder of a 7-year-old child by a 20-year-old boy in Binh Duong province recently. The culprit, aroused by porno movies from the ‘Net, committed the crime while drunk.
In another case, in Ha Tay province, both the victim and the murderers were juveniles. One of the murderers confessed that he and a friend went to the fields to cut grass. Passing an apple orchard, the two boys saw a little girl from their village who was also cutting grass. Obsessed by porno movies, they raped the child and killed her.
There were also cases in which both the victims and the culprits were websex regulars. In one case, two teenage girls in Hanoi ‘met’ a group of boys while surfing on the ‘Net at an Internet café in Tu Do alley, Hanoi. They all agreed to meet offline and, in due course, a terrible thing happened. They all went to a small hotel on Hoang Cau Street where the two girls became victims of their friends from the ‘Net. The boys had to suffer proper punishment by the law. For their part, the two girls would never forget their painful lesson.
Internet is a great achievement of the industrial age. It is like a door to an immense world of knowledge. That door always opens for everyone to discover both good and bad things.
Nguyen Tu Quang, director of the most reputed network security centre in Vietnam, BKAV, said that foreign sex websites (in foreign languages and run by foreigners) are not so influential here as Vietnamese language sex sites like Mocxi.
Quang said that it is technically impossible to prevent Internet users from visiting sex webs but Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can help control the practice. All Internet users in Vietnam must use Internet services provided by just a few ISPs, like VDC, FPT or Viettel. If these ISPs block accession to sex websites, Quang explained, the users cannot visit these sites.
According to Quang, it is important to block black sites systematically. It is not necessary and in fact impossible to block all sex websites, but the ISPs could block the big ones.
Quang said that regrettably, this job is not implemented well. State management agencies should have policies to force ISPs to do this task as their duty.
Some other countries have successfully curbed black websites, including Vietnam’s neighbor China. Vietnam should learn from them to apply their experience in Vietnam.
VietNamNet/ANTG