Drive Against Net Porn Misses Threats More Dangerous to Kids
Ever the optimist, I am not too hysterical about proposed congressional legislation to restrict Internet “indecency” on the pretext of protecting children. It threatens prison for doing something nobody can define, sure, but I’m hoping that either cooler heads will prevail, or that any draconian final law will fall before 1st Amendment challenges the way earlier such restrictions on speech have done. What, after all, is indecency? Who gets to decide? And how much harm is at stake anyway?
The sad thing about this whole debate is not that it will kill the Internet (it won’t), but how little it really has to do with protecting children. There is lots of pornography on the Net, if you know where to look, yet it’s hard to believe anyone could rank it among the most serious problems of children warranting congressional action.
To learn more about the state of our children, I decided to see if I could use that demon Internet to investigate genuine threats to their well-being. My goal was to prove two points: First, that regulating Internet indecency is a waste of time compared with what’s really troubling America’s kids, and second, that freedom of expression has helped make the Internet a remarkable tool for finding things out.
Within minutes, I had located a trove of relevant information. My first stop turned out to be some World Wide Web pages maintained by Ryan Clancey, a politically conservative Caltech student who provides a lot of information about the decline of the American family, complete with citations for all the data given. Believe me, it is not a pretty picture. (Visit https://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~rclancey/gov/lci/lci.html to see for yourself.) Consider child poverty, for instance. The proportion of American children on welfare rose from 3.5% in 1960 to 12.9% in 1991, and child poverty has been increasing fairly steadily since 1970, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. (Census Bureau data is cited.)
U.S. infant mortality remains higher than in most of Western Europe and some other places too; Clancey’s source here is a 1991 article in The Public Interest by Nicholas Eberstadt of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
Teen pregnancy rates roughly doubled from 1972 to 1990. Clancey says on his pages that “according to the American Enterprise Institute, teenage sexual activity will result in nearly 1 million pregnancies annually, leading to 406,000 abortions, 134,000 miscarriages and 409,000 live births. About 3 million teens will get a sexually transmitted disease.” Cited is a 1993 article (‘Teen Sex’) by Douglas Besharov with Karen Gardiner in the American Enterprise.
Spanking is increasingly taboo in polite circles, but divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are common. In the 30 years since 1960, the divorce rate doubled, although it fell a bit in the ‘80s, but then again the marriage rate for women slid throughout. During this same period, the number of children affected annually by divorce doubled, and the teen suicide rate more than tripled (National Center for Health Statistics). Today, two-thirds of children under 6 who live only with their mother also live in poverty (Census Bureau data).
Youthful crime, meanwhile, has soared: From 1965 to 1990, the juvenile arrest rate nearly quadrupled. (Attribution is to an FBI report, “Crime in the U.S. 1991: Juveniles and Violence 1965-1990.’) Clancey’s pages add that “less than 60% of all children today are living with their biological, married parents,” according to data in a Census report entitled “Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the 1990s.”
I think the congressional campaign against indecency on the Internet needs to be understood in this context. It arises from the same set of anxieties that bred the crusade against what was supposed to be widespread ritual abuse in day-care centers. As it turned out, of course, there was no nationwide conspiracy of satanic preschool instructors, although there was plenty of unfocused anxiety over what was happening to kids in day care.
Yet even if we could stamp out every last bit of indecency on the Internet, the effort would do nothing to reduce the deluge of materialism and violence that reaches children every day on TV. For proof, visit the Kansas State University College of Human Ecology (https://www.ksu.edu/humec/c&t.htm;). There I discovered that, by the time American youngsters graduate from high school, they’ve spent about 15,000 hours watching TV, which is more time than they spend in school.
And what nourishing fare! By the time they leave elementary school, children watching the typical amount of TV will see about 20,000 murders and more than 80,000 other assaults. It’s not all violence, of course; ‘the average child may see more than 20,000 TV commercials each year,” the college reports.
It should be obvious, from my wanderings on the Net this week, that something very wrong is happening in the lives of America’s children. It should also be obvious that it has very little to do with the Internet, compared with the actions of parents. (In fact, several techniques are already available for mothers and fathers who want to control what their children do online; I’ll examine some in a column in the weeks ahead.)
One of the most interesting developments in this area is occurring at the MIT Worldwide Web Consortium, which is working on a system called PICS, for Platform for Internet Content Selection. It would let parents control Internet access based on any rating system the parents themselves might choose.
That conservatives might use children to advance their agenda should come as no surprise to liberals, who have been doing the same for some time now. Yet the proposed Internet indecency restrictions fly in the face of what this conservative Congress is supposed to be all about. What happened to less government? Less regulation? What about property rights, for heavens sake? Copyright violations are commonplace on the Internet, after all, and they are a good deal more easily identified than indecency.
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In some respects, efforts to outlaw Internet porn are like the drive to ban flag-burning. Can anyone think of a more remote threat to the republic? Yet our elected leaders, rather than focus on income inequality, education, crime and other serious problems, recently wrangled over a constitutional amendment to bar the immolation of some symbolic cloth. They didn’t quite have the votes, so now they’re going after Internet smut.
God knows it’s easier than tackling, say, global warming, but I can’t help being reminded of the man looking for his keys far from where he saw them last, simply because “the light is better over here.”
Daniel Akst welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.caprica.com/~akst/.
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Search Tips
Most of the material in this column about the state of America’s children was unearthed using my favorite new Internet search engine: Digital Equipment Corp.’s https://www.altavista.digital.com, which claims to index 8 billion words in more than 16 million World Wide Web pages, as well as 13,000 newsgroups. Searches are surprisingly fast and reasonably accurate, and search results are presented quite coherently.
For a none-too-objective update on congressional efforts to regulate Internet indecency, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation at https://www.eff.org/, which is doing everything it can to oppose the measure. Click “alerts” for the latest information. Also, there is the Center for Democracy and Technology at https://www.cdt.org/.
