It’s late at night, you hear creaks, but it’s just the house settling down you think. The rain pelting down, wind howling, you leave the comfort of your bed to check if everything is fine in your house. As you walk through the passage you see a glow emanating from your sons bedroom. Its 2 am what could he be doing at this hour. You gently push open his bedroom door and to your shock and horror you gaze at the computer and displayed on the screen is a vile, immoral, gratuitous act of filth that makes you lose balance and you let out a scream that awakens the house and the reality that pornography was closer than you thought.

The advent of the Internet has a created a platform for the world to be opened up. Information is freely accessible at a touch of a button. With this freedom of information, come the vultures lurking in the background, ready to prey on the unsuspecting innocent people and children to entrap them in a world of filth. We face a grave issue that is destroying marriages, setting young people up for moral and marital failures, and ruining the character of millions of men and women, boys and girls. One bishop has called it an “Epidemic Attacking Dignity.” Make no mistake, like all epidemics; pornography is having a damaging effect on the lives of so many people.

The effects of pornography on sexual crimes are truly astounding. Whether it is major or minor, the effects remain the same and we face the daily dose of this scourge in newspapers, television and even social media. In an incident a couple of months ago, a Johannesburg woman was raped allegedly by her brother in Reiger Park, Johannesburg. The 19-year-old woman was boiling water to take a bath when her older brother asked her to remove her clothes. When she refused, he throttled her and raped her. Its vile acts like this where not even the sanctity of a relationship between a brother and sister is immune to pornography. However, research concerning the effects of pornography is inconclusive on the issue of crime. Some studies support the contention that the viewing of pornographic material may increase rates of sexual crimes, while others have shown no effects, or a decrease in the rates of such crimes. Most of these studies focus on various correlations and correlation does not imply causation.

The facts of pornography are shocking. Everyone knows that pornography is a huge presence online. It was the first big Internet industry and it’s still everywhere. Generally we just assume that these things are true, but don’t fathom the enormity of the industry. The comprehension of the facts is essential to bring to the fore the reality and make people realize, that this scourge must be eradicated from society before it destroys the world. The shocking facts of pornography, which reads like a horror story, are:

• 12% of the websites on the Internet are pornographic, that is 24,644,172 sites!
• Every second $ 3,075.64 is being spent on pornography while 28,258 Internet users are viewing porn.
• 70% of men aged 18-24 visit porn sites in a typical month, while 1 in 3 porn viewers are women
• The worldwide porn industry is worth $ 4,9 Billion.
• 25% of all search engine requests are pornographic related, that’s 68 million a day.
• 34% of internet users have experienced unwanted exposure to porn either through pop up ads, misdirected links or e-mails
• There are 116,000 searches for “child pornography” every day.
• The average age at which a child first sees porn online is 11 years.

Radio Islam’s Moulana Habib Bobat addressed the harms of porn & how to overcome it. He recommends the following tools to cure porn addiction.

• The first step is to acknowledge there is a problem.
• Make a promise and covenant with yourself Inshallah (if Allah wills) you will not access pornographic websites.
• Take a kassam (oath in Allah’s name) that if you do access porn websites you will pay a certain amount of money as a punishment to yourself.
• Embrace spirituality by reading salaah (prayer); this is one of the most effective ways of overcoming porn addiction.
• Look in the mirror, be ashamed and ask yourself why you have adopted this route and what the reasons for your actions are.
• Repent sincerely. Make a sincere Taubah (repentance) to Allah.
• Remove all traces of porn on your computers, tablets, mobile phones and resign from all sites that you are a member of.
• Don’t spend lonely nights surfing the internet. Try to retire to bed at the same time as other family members.
• Before turning on your computer, ask yourself the reasons for accessing the internet. Is there a need to access the internet?
• Think positive and use constructive tools to help yourself.
• Install software to filter pornographic websites and content.

As harmful as it is to spouse, children, friends and co-workers, pornography addiction hurts you the most. Lets start with the productive, positive, creative things we could be doing with our time, money and energy. The failure of chaos to arrive is puzzling, given how often its been called imminent. In the time we have left, what we need is neither more laws nor more research reports, but a rethinking of our cultural myths, especially those that concern the connection between images and actions. Why do we so powerfully desire to multiply images and yet cling to our fear of them? It would be immensely simpler, of course, to incinerate a few magazines than to explore the economic, social and psychological factors of which both rape and pornography are symptoms. Besides a stupendous bonfire whether the fuel be paper or flesh, has always stirred something very deep and very cold in the human heart.