JAMAICANS are developing a taste for seeing children having sex - including the children themselves, according to local psychologists.

"It (child pornography) is as addictive as anything else that provides some amount of pleasure - like your lotto and food," said psychologist Sidney McGill, operator of the Family and Counselling Centre. "There are some persons who enjoy looking at a young body, which exudes health - the shiny eyes, the naiveté, etc. Those are some of the traits, I think, that add to the sexual excitement - even where the person (viewing) is not a paedophile."

Montego Bay-based psychologist Dr Pearnel Bell attested to the excitement experienced by the viewers of such material.
"It is like a movie. There is a thrill out of seeing themselves on tape. For those doing the filming, the debased behaviour it is to get a high out of it. It is for their entertainment," she said.

Meanwhile, some critics believe the growing appetite for child pornography is being, in equal parts, fed and fuelled by the media.
"Children have been 'fooling around' sexually for centuries. What is happening now though is that you have far more media available for children below the age of 18," sociologist Dr Orville Taylor told the Sunday Observer.

Bell, for her part, noted that Jamaica's problem with pedophiles (adults having sex with children) was increasingly being brought to light.

"Paedophilia is a huge issue in Jamaica, but it is one of those issues that has really never got centre stage ...the number of young people who - even I see - have been molested by adults is tremendous. Half of it has not been reported, and we have young people who have lived with this molestation and abuse for years," she said. "What is new is the fact that now we have access to the media through videotaping and cellphone. And it has become a craze, with YouTube and all of that kind of thing. People are seeing it as an invention, and they get some sort of high from doing it (having sex with children and filming it). It is a maladapted behaviour."

Taylor, meanwhile, the increased demand and availability of child porn was drawing out the paedophiles.

"A person who is a paedophile is an abnormal kind of creature and I use the term without reservation - just like a rapist and a murderer even. They are persons who have something wrong with them. They are absolute freaks," he said. "So where the opportunity presents itself, then the worms will come from out of the woodwork. I don't know whether it is an increase in the total number of paedophiles or whether it is that they now have more opportunity to do it."

It was two years ago that one of the more popular child pornography cases came to light when a video, featuring a group of boys sexually assaulting a young schoolgirl under the supervision of a church deacon, was brought to the public's attention. Since then, there has been a string of cases involving the circulation of mostly school age children having sex with each other or with adults.

Concerns over sex in schools, its filming and subsequent distribution whether via the Internet or through the use of cellphones have prompted the outcry of the Office of the Children's Advocate, which has called for immediate action on the issue. The first order of business is to be the Child Pornography Act, which is to make it illegal to produce, possess or circulate child pornography.

But Bell, Taylor and McGill are calling for further action to stem the tide of child pornography.

The spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS, increased teenage pregnancies and the worsening decay of the society's moral fabric is, they say, the price of failing to act.

Chief among the measures that need to be implemented, Bell said, is the enforcement of values through stringent censorship.

McGill also cited the need for a national coalition that would see each responsible adult taking more of an interest in children and their welfare.
They all agreed that the media will have to be censored, particularly as regards the airing of certain types of musical content.

Beyond that, Taylor said that the Internet will have to be policed locally.
"It is going to be very difficult. You are going to have to start policing the Internet. You start having very stringent penalties for sex offences - including the very act of possessing a forwarded e-mail from somebody about some girl (caught on tape in a sex act) and who sends it to 50 other people. If you send it to somebody at the Child Development Agency, then that is different," he said.

Further, he said parents will have to be held responsible for what their children get involved in.