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
This is a super interesting question because it balances on the borderline of what is dangerous and what is an American right to freedom of speech and expression. Your comment about the Supreme Court shooting down two bills aimed at protecting children specifically highlights the difficulty with this topic. First let's look at some facts to understand the environment that children are now exposed to from an early age:
ReplyDelete1. Computer usage is being introduced at increasingly early ages. Toddlers are becoming proficient with iPads for example. Availability of these dangerous exposures occurs very early and with the filterless exposure to pornography and the natural drive for children, adolescents, and adults to seek it out the industry is booming through the ever growing sexualization of our culture.
2. Pornography is something that has gone from Taboo to mainstream. From a male perspective, I would say that most men who grew up in this age of computers use pornography.
3. In cultures that have been pornography friendly for longer than America, such as Japan and Korea, men have become increasingly uninterested in forming romantic relationships and growing detached from the natural sexual drives. They are establishing pornography as a concrete aspect of their daily culture and many social and health problems are arising.
In the 1980s studies finally revealed that cigarettes which had previously been a staple of American culture had spent 80+ years hiding behind the social veil and killing people at an alarming rate. I believe that pornography is the next silent "killer" in that the new generations of Americans are going to begin experiencing health, social, and emotional problems as a result of socially institutionalized hypersexuality
Pornography and the fight against pornography has been rebuked as a right of freedom of speech. People still have the right to smoke, but are quitting by choice after the country-wide PSA of the risks and dangers. You can use all of the strategies listed above to protect individual children as a parent, but the only way to make children truly safe from this predatory and emotionally divisive corporation is on a national scale.
We need research conducted on the health and emotional detriments of pornography, we need this information widely distributed, and once the nation has realized this awful industry is killing relationships and the drive for human interaction then "freedom of speech" will no longer be an acceptable response and we can see some real implementation of protective measures on the internet from pornography and children will benefit.
This isn't an issue that an individual strategy can fix, the institution of pornography is too sewn into American culture at this point so the only way to protect the kids is for the entire country to realize that protection of all people, but most of all children, from pornography is more important than the right of people to check out dirty videos on their lunch break.
Article on Japan: http://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-japanese-people-arent-having-sex-2015-7
Scott,
ReplyDeleteYour take on pornography is interesting. My understanding of your comment is that in order to combat the issue of pornography is to treat it like it is a toxin that is creating a disease in the lives of American people. It would be interesting to see the research conducted on the health and emotional detriments of pornography. I do agree that the best way to combat negative behaviors is to completely expose the affect that they have. This reminds me of the initiatives that Ohio is taking to combat texting and driving. On Ronald Reagan highway, there have been messages that give facts about the teenage death rates on texting and driving. There have also been messages saying “your LOL can wait”. There is more of an impact of giving information on texting and driving when you view it while you are driving. It causes you to think twice about pulling out your phone and responding to a text. So, if studies are to be done on the affects of pornography, we can use that information to sway the behaviors of people. However, I wonder how this would affect the people who are truly porn addicts? Would this nationwide method work for all people? Would it work for parents trying to protect their children?
Ayana