When it comes to Internet Safety and protecting our children, there are many threats that include access to pornography, cyber bullying, spyware, and online predators. Access to Pornography includes Child Pornography, videos or pictures that focus on sexual acts, sexual violence, and indecent pictures. It seems as though, as technology advances the access to inappropriate sites and pictures increases. Many of my students are really big on social media. They have Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Whenever a new social media site becomes available, the students are the first to begin using it. With that usage brings about threats to the safety of children. However, it is not only the content on social media that threatens children, it also various search engines such as Google, Bing, Internet Explorer, and Yahoo. If you search for a particular image on Google, that may not be a pornographic image, as you scroll through the images they can quickly take on a pornographic nature. According to Internet Safety 101, "Pornography has become increasingly acceptable, accessible, and freely available, and it is one of the biggest threats to our children’s online safety. Today, any child with unrestricted Internet access is just a mouse click away from viewing, either intentionally or accidentally, sexually explicit material online, from adult pornography (the kind of images that appear in Playboy) to prosecutable material depicting graphic sex acts, live sex shows, orgies, bestiality, and violence. Even material depicting the actual sexual abuse of a child (child pornography)—once only found on the black market—is instantly available and accessible on the Internet. Through the Internet, much of this aberrant material has entered the mainstream, directly impacting our children's healthy sexual development" (n.d.). In my opinion, one of the negative affects that access to pornography has on children is that it makes them think that certain behaviors are acceptable that are not. For example, a student (male or female) touching another student inappropriately because they have seen it in a video on Facebook. Or, saying something inappropriate to another student because they saw it on a meme on Facebook. Since access to pornography can have such a negative affect on children, something should be done about it right? Shouldn't there be laws that restrict the access to pornography on the internet? According to Shulevitz (2016), "two bills passes by Congress to restrict minors' access to pornography over the past two decades were struck down by the Supreme Court because they infringed on adults' First Amendment Rights". Therefore, the restriction of access to pornography rests in the hand of the parents (as it should be anyways). There are a lot of resources for parents to create restrictions and censor the websites that their children visit and what they are exposed to.
Here are my suggestions:
- Physical and Literal monitoring by parents- sit in the same room and watch the websites that your children visit.
- Block Access- Some internet providers have controls for parents to block access to certain websites. I am with Time Warner Cable and they have settings for blocking websites.
- Download software- there is software that allows parents to not only block access but to also monitor visited websites.
- Social Media- determine rules for the usage of social media. For example, no social media accounts at all until they reach a certain age.
Can you all think of any other ways to decrease access to pornography? What do you all think about internet safety in regards to access to pornography?
Shulevitz, J. (2016). It's ok, liberal parents, you can freak out about porn. Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/its-ok-liberal-parents-you-can-freak-out-about-porn.html?_r=1
