Government officials and online service providers announced plans at a December summit to protect children from Internet obscenity, but some conservative Christian organizations believe the gathering amounted to little more than family-values window dressing.
The three-day "Internet/Online Summit: Focus on the Children" assembled government, school, library, computer-industry, and child-advocacy group leaders in Washington, D.C. While representatives did not agree on the best way to restrict youth from viewing pornography geared to adults, Vice President Al Gore announced a "zero tolerance" policy on Internet pornography depicting children and the creation of a "tip line," where parents can report child pornography.
Online providers are supporting the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children "CyberTipLine" initiative. Parents will be able to notify authorities of incidents of child pornography and child predators in cyberspace. The line will serve as a clearinghouse for tips on enticement of children for sexual exploitation, as well as information on the possession or distribution of child pornography. The new Web site is www.missingkids.com/cybertip and the center's hotline is 1-800-843-5678.
During the Clinton administration, as the use of graphics on the Web has increased and Internet technology has developed, the number of Justice Department agents patrolling cyberspace has risen from a handful to more than 100, and FBI arrests have led to the convictions of more than 100 online child predators.
Gore also unveiled a public education campaign to teach parents how to protect children surfing the Internet. While online providers say parents have primary responsibility to monitor the computer behavior of their children, at the summit several announced pre-emptive plans in an effort to prevent government intrusion.
For example, America Online unveiled a package of initiatives to make online navigation safer for children. AOL, the largest online service in the world with 10 million subscribers, will soon feature a permanent parental controls button on the welcome screen that enables adults to lock children out of anything but approved areas, chat rooms, and Web sites. In addition, AOL will activate a button to allow members to report inappropriate chat room, e-mail, and instant-message activity immediately.
SCREENING NO PANACEA: The Vice President did not heed the requests of profamily organizations to increase government restrictions to protect children. Instead, Gore's public-education campaign will rely on parents to monitor the online behavior of their children.
However, according to a new survey by FamilyPC, few parents avail themselves of commercially available parental control software designed to combat access to pornography. The survey of 750 families whose children use the Web showed only 26 percent use some form of parental-control software—mainly controls built into their Web browsers or offered by their Internet service provider. Only 4 percent had purchased parental-control software such as Cyber Patrol, SurfWatch, or Net Nanny on their own.
With only a few mouse clicks, anyone can access one of an estimated 72,000 pornographic sites on the World Wide Web. Many of them are illegal sites because they meet the definition of hard-core obscenity, depicting such behavior as incest, bestiality, and mutilation.
Screening technology alone is inadequate, critics contend, and further legal regulation of indecent content is necessary. "No screening technology blocks all sites containing harmful sexual content," says Morality in Media (MIM) president Robert W. Peters.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? Cathy Cleaver, legal policy director of the Family Research Council, says 70 percent of Internet access by children occurs outside the home. She says public schools and libraries—which commonly offer uncensored, unsupervised access to the Internet—must be part of the solution.
Although computer users must typically provide a credit card number before gaining unrestricted access to a commercial Web site, porn cover pages frequently offer free samples to titillate before payment. And while cyberporn providers warn viewers that they must be at least 18 or 21, there is usually no age verification process.
And the problem goes beyond purchased images. For example, unregulated news groups and unsolicited e-mail are two ways pornographers can target potential customers.
Online services claim that regulating Internet content is impossible and would run afoul of First Amendment protections. But profamily groups disagree. Cleaver blames the industry for failure to remove hard-core, "clearly obscene" pornography.
"The onus should be on the Internet service providers that knowingly permit harmful material—not the parents," MIM's Peters says.
Even though many conservative Christian groups lambasted the summit, the antiporn group Enough Is Enough helped to organize it. "This is a good first step in the very long journey toward protecting children from exploitation online," says Donna Rice Hughes, the organization's communications director. Hughes says Enough Is Enough gave Gore the "zero tolerance" idea.
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Nonetheless, Enough Is Enough, along with many other profamily groups, vowed to hold law enforcement and industry service providers accountable to ensure that measures introduced at the summit come to fruition.
NO PROSECUTION POLICY? As for "adult" pornography, the Supreme Court nullified the indecency provisions of the congressional Communications Decency Act (CDA) last June. But American Family Association governmental affairs director Patrick A. Trueman notes that the Court left provisions restricting obscenity intact. Obscenity is defined as hard-core graphic material that is obsessed with sex, obviously offensive, and lacking in serious value. Trueman criticizes the Clinton administration for refusing to prosecute any Internet-related hard-core pornography cases since then.
"The Clinton administration has a 'no prosecution policy' for Internet obscenity crimes," Trueman says.
After CDA, Clinton reiterated that his administration is "committed to vigorous enforcement of federal prohibitions against transmission of pornography over the Internet." He first pledged to enforce vigorously federal obscenity laws during his 1992 campaign against George Bush. But Peters says that overall, federal obscenity prosecutions have fallen from a high of 78 during President Bush's first year in office to a low of 17 during the past year under Clinton. He questions whether enforcement is really a priority.
"The summit goal will not be achieved unless there is a radical change in the policy in place at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the offices of U.S. attorneys," MIM's Peters says.
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