Weekday afternoons are busy for the 14-year-old Mumbai schoolgirl. That is when Sushmita (not her real name) returns home to an empty house and logs on to the computer. The social networking sites don’t excite her — what gets her going are her favourite pornographic sites.

Legislators have company — young teenagers, and children who are even younger, are getting addicted to porn. Counsellors say that schoolchildren as young as nine or 10 are regularly viewing pornography on the Internet.

Over the mobile phone or in corners of the classroom, they swap stories about the onscreen antics of their porn stars. “They also develop preferences within pornography — young man-older woman, threesomes, bondage or same sex couplings,” says Mumbai counsellor Swati Deepak.

Watching or reading pornography, experts say, is part of growing up. But what worries educationists and parents is that many children are going beyond that; they are getting addicted to porn — which may have serious repercussions.

Take Sushmita’s case. The teenager soon decided to replace what she saw on the screen with real life. She went to bed with a college-going male friend and copied the porn stars she’d been viewing. When she missed her next period, she shared her predicament with the school counsellor. Her mother was called to the school, a hasty abortion followed and there was heartbreak in the household.

Or take the case of Vikas, a 14-year-old who has been hooked on porn sites for two years. He also logs on to a chat site, where he poses as an older man and engages in sex talk with other men. But Vikas felt threatened some weeks ago when one of the men he chats with began stalking him.

“I get an average of a case a fortnight of adolescents addicted to porn,” says Dr Raj Brahmabhatt, sexologist and marriage counsellor, Mumbai. “Many of them are seventh and eighth standard boys, from some of Mumbai’s top schools.”

And it’s not restricted to the elite schools, says Shankar Chatla, a teacher at a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation school at Worli, Mumbai’s mill district. Some students watch pornographic clips before coming to school in the morning. “I overhear them discussing pornography even in the first half of the school day,” Chatla says.

At the same school, teachers have overheard young children sitting together, sharing explicit details of their parents having sex at night, or watching porn on the television. “The children are candid about what they see but do not understand what’s happening,” says Nisha Nair, a counsellor and special educator with Muktangan, an NGO working with seven municipality schools in Mumbai. “However, as they grow up they realise it is not to be discussed freely and become more hush hush about it,” she adds.

Guilt is compounded by the fact that such children have little control over their fantasies. A young boy who was addicted to porn confessed to Dr Brahmabhatt that he didn’t just yell at his mother when she entered his room, but fantasised about her as well.

There is no medical definition of porn addiction as yet, but it figures as a symptom of hypersexual disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Hypersexual disorder is described as “recurrent and intense sexual fantasies, sexual urges, and sexual behaviour” experienced over a period of at least six months. The person concerned devotes excessive time to “sexual fantasies and urges, and plans for and engages” in sexual behaviour, repetitively “engaging” in these sexual fantasies, urges and behaviour in a state of anxiety, depression, boredom or irritability.

Any kind of addiction, experts hold, is characterised by impaired control and the need for immediate gratification. Despite adverse consequences such as guilt or fear, addicts continue with their activity. And when their addiction is denied to them, they suffer from anxiety, cravings and irritability.

A child who is addicted will focus on the back and forth movements of the sex act for a large part of his waking hours, says Kunjal S., a counsellor in Mumbai. “If a child has been up several nights in a row at the computer and rushes to turn it off when the milkman comes home, he could be addicted to porn,” Kunjal adds.

Like in any addiction, it can make the child dysfunctional — leading to unhappy marriages and, in extreme cases, sexual crimes. “Youngsters addicted to porn typically tend to objectify a woman in terms of her body. At the unconscious level, they view her as somebody who has the power to either give or deny sex, and therefore could cause them to be tongue-tied in front of a woman.”

Not surprisingly, children who have had only porn as their sex education end up becoming confused about sex. Counsellor Deepak is asked questions such as “Does size matter?” She says, “For them, sex is something between a macho man and a beautiful woman.”

But in the absence of such questions being answered, children experiment on their own, leading to disastrous results. A 14-year-old girl, whom Deepak had counselled, went to bed with two of her boyfriends and a girlfriend, after getting inspired by porn clips that she’d watched with them.

“It is important for parents not to react with an ‘Oh my God’ as that creates guilt and further intrigue in porn,” warns Kunjal.

The counsellor stresses that parents of children found spending long hours watching porn should tackle them gently and seek professional help. “A younger child could be helped by play therapy, while an older one would need counselling, based on his behaviour, which could commonly range from disinterest to irritation or even aggression.”

Kunjal adds that it is easier for addiction-related behaviour to be corrected. “But it would take a little longer to change their ideas of relationships that have been shaped by porn.”