SUVA, Fiji — Fiji’s government has announced a forthcoming “task force” aiming to reduce porn viewership among its citizens, following a political and media campaign that sensationalized the issue of access to adult material in the island nation.
“Fiji has one of the highest rates of internet use in the Pacific and this digital revolution is causing a problem for its government — unfettered access to porn,” reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) network.
The government effort is being spearheaded by Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Communications Manoa Kamikamica.
Kamikamica warned that the campaign will spark “privacy, freedom of expression, security, censorship, technological and individual liberty considerations.” Nevertheless, he expressed support for the task force initiative, asserting that there is a “complex relationship” between pornography and “an increase in sexual-related crimes,” the ABC reported.
This supposed connection — a controversial, tendentious theory that does not differentiate between correlation and causation — is also currently being advanced by anti-porn crusaders in politics and the media in Italy and Spain.
Kamikamica also cited sensational-sounding data, which he claimed to have received from an unnamed internet service provider, showing that 626.13 terabytes of internet traffic was used to view porn in Fiji during the last quarter.
“To put this into context, 626 terabytes of data is approximately equal to the amount of data stored in 100 million books,” Kamikamica explained. He did not offer further details or explain how “porn” was defined in this instance.
Kamikamica also alleged that Fiji “ranked in the top 10 countries of the provider’s network for internet traffic to porn websites.”
The data echoes a claim made three years ago by Fiji’s Minister for Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation Lynda Tabuya, who cited Google Trends figures ranking Fiji among the top 10 countries in percentage of searches for the words “porn” and “pornography.”
Tabuya has been affiliated with the religiously inspired group Fiji Free From Porn, which is mostly active in churches and on Facebook. The group’s avowed mission is “speaking openly and honestly about pornography addiction,” a term that does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
Kamikamica obtained bipartisan support for creating the new government task force, which he says will aim to “reduce high volumes of porn-related internet traffic” — which he termed “a social ill” — and will focus on “education around consent and healthy relationships.”
The task force will launch in early 2024.
Main Image: Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica at "Safer Internet Day" 2023 (Photo: Fiji Ministry of Commerce, Trade, Tourism and Transport)
