Children having sex is nothing new.
Doing so in their school uniforms, is also something we can easily imagine, and may even have done ourselves back in the day.
But sexual acts on the playground, surrounded by other kids, while being filmed – well, that’s another level of brazenness.
As a media worker in South Africa, very little surprises me anymore.
Over the years, some stories have stood out for their display of the depth of human depravity, while others have imprinted themselves on my brain for the sheer scope of their extraordinary unbelievability.
But this story has the ability to make me laugh in despair, while making me sad and angry, all at the same time.
It reminds me of a scene from the movie Boogie Nights, which was a behind-the-scene look at America’s booming 1970s porn industry.
In the scene, a curious man approaches a group of people in a parking lot, to see what they are all looking at.
To his utter dismay, he sees his porn-star wife in the act with another man, right there in broad daylight, in front of an audience.
She scolds him casually and tells him to go away, because “…can’t you see I’m busy.”
Much like what happened on the Plumstead High school grounds, the scene is a depiction of how hedonistically unhinged we have become as a society.
There is obviously a massive hole in what we are teaching our children and the digital content that we are allowing them to consume.
Children will always be more influenced by their peers, by popular media and by what they believe is cool, rather than by parents and teachers.
So it therefore stands to reason that we either need to control what content they consume, or limit it.
It’s not so much the fact that these two kids felt like pleasuring themselves in the middle of the day, at school, but rather that they didn’t think anything of taking something that most kids their age would loath to admit doing in private, and making it into a sex exhibition to be filmed and distributed.
Something in our society made them believe that such behaviour is not just OK, but actually cool.
We still have a lot of introspection to do!