North Korea declares 'sexual immorality' treason: Parents will be punished if 'decadent capitalist influences' like Japanese porn are allowed to influence teenagers
by Tim Stickings For Mailonline- Pyongyang has ordered 'strong measures' to tackle an outbreak of promiscuity
- Party officials see it as a 'treasonous act' that 'helps the enemy destroy society'
- Materials including Japanese porn are thought to be imported from China
North Korea has declared that 'sexual immorality' is treason in a bid to stop Japanese porn and racy foreign films from corrupting its youth.
Pyongyang has ordered a crackdown after noticing that 'more and more high school boys and girls are engaging in immoral sexual deviance'.
Party bureaucrats see promiscuity as 'a treasonous act that helps the enemy to destroy our society', a source in the country told Radio Free Asia.
Schools have been ordered to check for phones with salacious material while teachers and parents have been threatened with punishments under the new rules.
Materials including Japanese porn and racy films from South Korea and the U.S. are thought to circulate on phones and USB drives which arrive from China.
The rise of mobile phones has made it easier for youngsters to get their hands on such materials, officials fear, although smartphones are heavily monitored.
The ruling party's Central Committee has urged 'strong measures' amid fears that young people are being 'influenced by capitalist lifestyles'.
The committee 'defined sexual promiscuity among teenagers as a treasonous act that helps the enemy to destroy our society,' the source in North Korea said.
'The Central Committee pointed out that the reason why [sexual promiscuity] is so common in students these days is because they are imbued with decadent capitalist culture, due to the increase in electronic media, including mobile phones.
'Since they are warning of strong punishment, students are shaking with fear.'
Teachers are also said to be 'anxious' because principals and tutors have been warned that they too will be punished if such behaviour is allowed to continue.
Some of the alleged decadence was uncovered in an inspection by the Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist Youth League, named after Kim Jong-un's two predecessors.
Human Rights Watch warned in a 2018 report that North Korean schools provide little sex education and that men and women are left 'unprepared for the realities of sexual activity'.
People in North Korea 'know little about reproductive health, pregnancy, contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, or sexual crimes and seldom talk about these topics, the report said.
The porn coming over the border from China has also led to an 'increased depiction of women as sexual objects,' it warned.
Phones in North Korea are already subject to surveillance by various agencies including the army and the ruling party.
The country has an operating system called Red Star which can scan for words or phrases deemed unfavourable to the regime and delete them.
Red Star also uses software that takes regular screenshots of what is being displayed on a person's screen.
The screenshots cannot be deleted by a typical user, but are available for checking if a trained government official decides to take a look.
Instead of the World Wide Web, North Koreans have access to a specially-designed intranet which is sealed off from the outside world.
Some North Koreans living near the Chinese border secretly use phones on Chinese networks to bypass state control.