The NGO also claimed to have surveyed 200 male under graduate students from 10 different colleges in the State and came up with startling conclusions that 80 percent of college boys watch pornography and 40 percent watch violent porn. A statistics, mathematics and ethics lecturer from London, Clifford Jacob who goes by the name Abishek and calls himself the CEO of Rescue108 says he came to India 18 years ago on business. In 2011 he started Rescue108 whose main aim, he says, is to educate the youth about the consequences of porn addiction.
Clifford says the NGO’s main focus is to educate young people of India on the consequences of porn addiction which is “worse than marijuana and cocaine addictions”. He claims the organisation isn’t religious and religious topics don’t feature in their programmes, except for the “occasional mention of God”. The organisation has links to the Anglican Church in England although he denies such links, saying all the trustees are Indian and he is employed as a volunteer. The cyber ethics awareness workshops in India are held free of cost, he stresses. But when asked where the organisation gets its funding, he declines comment, saying instead that funds came from those who have benefitted from the workshops in the past.
Clifford says the results of their survey of college boys watching porn in Goa were very high when compared to figures
in Karnataka where it was 32 per cent for degree colleges and 29 per cent for higher secondary schools. The survey figures in Goa are highly suspect, especially when Clifford explains the methodology used in obtaining them. The survey was not a written one. Rescue108 approached boys from colleges in June and July over a period of six weeks on the condition of anonymity and orally asked them to, “think of the friends they know cousins, neighbours and other boys their age and what percentage of them watch porn and what percentage of them watch violent porn”. They then “simply took the mean or the
average of the 200 answers” that they got.
When the organisation started conducting surveys two years ago they found that students were reluctant to accurately
confess their personal porn habits Hence boys answering were given the freedom to “consider their friends and their
own experience without self exposure or embarrassment,”
Clifford says.
The NGO’s unscientific findings received much negative
publicity here. Its cyber ethics awareness programmes too
were questioned for propagating absurd and unscientific
advice to students such as watching porn could lead to homosexuality
and divorces.
Clifford was allowed access to students of engineering,
pharmacy, polytechnic as well as nursing colleges in Goa and
even addressed the media in the Directorate of Education in
Porvorim where he even told reporters that climate change
could be God’s way of telling people to stop abortions.
Students were appalled by his advice and psychologists
angry that he was allowed to influence young impressionable
minds in the State. The question is, why did the authorities
lay out the red carpet for him?
