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editorial

Lurid tales of teen sex

After all the excitement is over

These are days when Panama has some important decisions to make, when voters from all walks of life ought to be studying the mountains of data and the myriad conflicting opinions about a canal expansion decision that will affect their lives for better or worse for years to come. It's a time to think soberly about the future.

Adults aren't the only ones in need of education and sober reflection about long-term issues. Our health ministry notes that some 20 percent of the nation's newborns have as their mothers girls under the age of 18. Within that figure there are many stories, and problems of varying complexity and severity.

One of the more severe, if not necessarily more complex, parts of the story is about the roles many of our mass communications media play, starting with the reporting of aspects of this story.

To the "if it bleeds, it leads" news editing mentality, sensational tales of underage sex sell. And thus we have of late been inundated with tales of grown men busted in pushbuttons with high school girls, gringo pornographers purveying photos of Panamanian boys engaged in homosexual acts, the jailing of a reggaeton singer for alleged sexual relations with a minor, schoolteachers as sexual predators of their students and on and on.

Like the trashy sex and violence movies that our TV moguls like to import from Hollywood and the many equally lurid telenovelas that we import from other Latin American countries, like many messages emanating from our national equivalent of gangsta rap, like the prostitution that all but the most clueless adolescents can see all around them, this sexual miseducation has a twisting and corrosive effect on society and particularly on its younger members. However, the censorship for which lame brained politicians periodically call never really works and moreover tends to be turned into a tool for far more sinister purposes than its advertised one. Would-be censors who are sincerely concerned about the cultural influences about which they profess concern would do much better to act as critics instead, documenting and singling out particular things to call pernicious for particular reasons.

And should the newspapers report the arrests of grown men for sexual relations with minors? The phenomenon is as newsworthy as any other crime story, but on the other hand when it's a matter of an 18-year-old high school student making love with his 16-year-old girlfriend from the same school it becomes misrepresentation to treat it as pedophilia and a terrible invasion of the kids' privacy. We have seen both of those phenomena lately.

Teenagers are sexual beings. It's a natural part of the human life cycle and when not properly handled can be the cause of lasting problems. The mass communications media, like adult society in general, can play a positive role or a negative one by the decent or indecent ideas they propagate about this subject.

The good news in all of this is that despite all of the nasty things that can be truthfully said about our society's institutions and the people who run them there are also some voices of wisdom in those quarters, as there long have been. Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez is calling for better and earlier sex education in the schools. She makes a sensible proposal. Legislator Susana Richa de Torrijos, herself a former education minister, laments a decline in our higher education that she says leaves new teachers not as well prepared to deal with issues of youthful sexuality as were their colleagues of an earlier generation. She suggests improvements in the preparation of educators. Religious leaders, despite their differing perspectives, appear to be united on the common ground of insisting upon the inclusion of a sense of ethics when the subject of sex is broached. There has been some solid and responsible journalism about these matters, against which the unworthy stuff can be measured and found wanting.

One can't help but thinking, however, that the present journalistic fixation upon stories about ordinary or perverse sex involving teenagers is not so much that there is suddenly more of this, but rather that it's the result of an editorial decision by media moguls who have partisan or economic motives to change the subject of the national debate from the momentous canal expansion story to something else. It's also hard to have a lot of respect for those who constantly purvey amoral, commercial or even predatory notions of sexuality when they now raise the banner of morality.

Nor should we give the Torrijos administration --- in many ways a subsidiary of the ad agency cartel that specializes in the commercialization of sex --- any net credit on this issue so long as it continues to allows the pedophile Ronald H. Kelly to remain in this country. Our mainstream media have been ever so curiously silent about Kelly, the multimillionaire former Catholic priest and former chief financial officer of the Archdiocese of Toronto who carries with him a criminal record of 10 counts of molesting underage boys yet is still allowed to live here.

What Panama needs to do here is to set and enforce standards, or rather, a standard. In our public institutions, our private sector and in our daily lives there ought to be a moral standard, a high standard, a sensible standard and above all a single standard of conduct. That may not go over well in a society in which everything's negotiable and everything's for sale, but then those latter two conditions are also substandard ways of living that this country needs to reject in order to get ahead in this world.

Bear in mind...

How many tyrants had begun by being charming, beguiling, attractive? Still, they all ended up the same.

Iain M. Banks

Love, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest.

Helen Rowland

As it is my country, I have an incontestable right to want for it what in my opinion is the best.

Simón Bolívar