Schoolers glued to death, porn, violence – Study
Published:Tuesday | September 13, 2022 | 12:08 AM
Besides experimenting with Molly and other dangerous drugs, some high-school students have now turned to a secret website where they not only view bodies and see how persons are murdered, but have embarked on uploading pictures of dead people from crash sites locally.
It has also been disclosed that some students have been recording themselves having sex in classrooms, with their faces shown, as well as school fights. These videos are then uploaded to school WhatsApp groups.
The trends, which were among other worrying social media behaviour involving students, were highlighted in a recent risk assessment study conducted in 13 high schools by the National Council on Drug Abuse.
“You have a website where you can see, like, dead people; and you can see, like, how they get chop up in their head or on their body. It is new; where people get videos from the crash site and just upload (them),” one student was reported as saying.
“And they have a school page, too, because I have seen the page where boys are doing stuff, but that got banned,” the student added.
The student was one of 160 eighth- to 10th-graders who were interviewed during a focus group session in July, along with 20 guidance counsellors.
“We see the new trend that is going around on social media, we see our friends doing stuff, so we feel like we don’t want to be the odd one out; and so we are going to do it, too,” another participant was captured saying.
According to one student, recorded fights are shared through WhatsApp groups in different schools.
“They actually build a group for it and send it in. Overall, it is in every school,” the student said.
According to one guidance counsellor, students were still sending each other pictures of their body parts, which were sometimes posted online.
Another issue raised by one of the student participants was that schoolgirls were texting and meeting up with men who they networked with on Instagram, who “lead them astray and rape them”.
Of concern to many guidance counsellors in the study was the overly sexualised behaviour being exhibited by students on school compounds, with some alluding to an increase in teenage pregnancy, resulting in school dropouts.
“Sexual content, sexual deviation, all the whole sexual things that you can think of, everything you can think of. The exposure for students with sexually inappropriate content, and, of course, many of them become part of social groups, WhatsApp groups and so forth, outside of a school content that created that situation as well,” one counsellor noted.
Another said that there has been an anecdotal increase in sexualised behaviour since students have returned from virtual learning. In-person classes were discontinued for most of the last two school years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A primary finding from the study, titled, The Voices of Adolescents: A Rapid Situation Assessment on Substance Use and Urgent Issues in Secondary Schools, found that Molly, or ecstasy, vape, and edibles were the three main drugs being used by students.
Molly is a mind-altering drug with hallucinogenic effects which is produced in improvised labs and packaged for the youth. It can cause severe physical and psychological consequences. It is also potentially lethal.
The Ministry of Health and Wellness has set aside a $20-million fund for behaviour modification and counselling efforts to treat students who are facing challenges.