Viewpoint: The Parent as Human Firewall

In his decision yesterday which struck down the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, Judge Lowell Reed, Jr., agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union's contention that technological measures can do a better job of protecting children from access to content that any "average" person might deem harmful to them, than some regulation that threatens a $50,000 fine and six months in jail.

While I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment, I would suggest that Judge Reed's opinion, removed from the local context of the ACLU v. Gonzales case and applied to the broader context of our everyday lives, omits mention of an extremely important fact: While the US government could not possibly protect the nation's youngsters from the dangers of communicating on the Internet, and should not be expected to, the burden now shifts to the parent. And in recent days, parents have not fared much better.

Yesterday, the aforementioned "Gonzales" - specifically, the embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales - faced a barrage of reporters at a press conference whose stated purpose was to unveil a Justice Dept. campaign to help make parents aware of the dangers their children face online. Of course, none of them really gave a damn about the ostensible purpose of the conference; they were waiting for Gonzales to deliver the sound bite, "And oh, by the way, I'm so sorry about the firings of those eight US attorneys, and I resign..." which he didn't. Had the "Protect Safe Childhood" slogan not been plastered on the wall behind him like "Action News" banners behind a 1980s anchorman, we might never have known what he was there to talk about in the first place.

The campaign the Attorney General unveiled is a collective law enforcement effort aimed at making parents aware of the very real dangers of children being exploited and solicited through online communications. This is the danger the COPA Act never gathered the wherewithal to adequately categorize, having seemingly been written by a handful of men whose greatest fear appears to have been inadvertently leaving Playboys on the rim of the bathtub.

It is a noble and genuine cause. The fact that online chat can and does exist in an unmonitored realm of guaranteed anonymity, with the exception of certain innocent participants who volunteer their personal and private identifying data after merely having been told that Alyssa is such a pretty name, embarrasses and shames me as someone who had such high hopes for this medium. In the interest of encouraging personal freedom of expression, we have brought forth a system that summons our newly invigorated and empowered youth to broadcast the diaries of their lives to millions, while at the same time ensuring the anonymity and security of those whose prurient interests are triggered by precisely that information.

As parents, my wife and I made a conscious and concerted decision: Our daughter will not have her own Web page or public space to serve as a billboard for her emergence into society. It is not that we find MySpace in particular to be some manifestation of evil. It is that we have seen the harm that online exploitation can do to a child, and we will not allow it to happen to ours. And because I really can monitor my child's activities online, on a very, very granular level, I can make this guarantee.

But my ability to do so is the product of a 27-year career in computing and technical publishing. I can read an event log. I am extremely lucky.

The people whom Attorney General Gonzales attempted to address yesterday, the lawyer termination scandal notwithstanding, include the parents who had high hopes that the COPA Act would frighten away online predators back to their hiding places in, I suppose, the caves of Afghanistan. He tried to address all of us parents, in plain language: "As Attorney General and as a father," he said, "I am committed to protecting our children from pedophiles who troll the Internet for kids. The Think Before You Post campaign sends a strong reminder to children and their parents to be cautious when posting personal information online because anything you post, anyone can see: family, friends and even not-so-friendly people."

In absolute fairness, this message has yet to pierce our dense skulls to reach our preoccupied brains. Whether by accident or design, we've managed to create a fuzzy, impersonalized stereotype for "the Online Predator," almost like an extra in a crime drama, alongside "the Kooky Neighbor," "the Religious Terrorist," and "the Corrupt Government Official." The Online Predator has inadvertently become the most popular character in the weekly TV drama that used to be called Dateline: NBC. We've built up a sort of chocolatey candy coating around this character to insulate him from our everyday reality, partly because we're not comfortable dealing with him directly, partly because we're afraid that he and "the Kooky Neighbor" are the same person.

But the problem with Mr. Gonzales' otherwise noble effort to help us parents neutralize a genuine threat to our children's security, is that the approach it takes appears to have been copied from a 1950s anti-Communist or anti-marijuana propaganda campaign. With the notion that the only way to make an effective value proposition, even to parents, is by statistically demonstrating its effects on the bottom line, the Justice Dept. and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children cite raw numbers.

Some are compelling. For instance, an NCMEC study finds that of children surveyed ages 10-17 who use the Internet regularly, 34% have posted their real name online, and 45% have posted their real age.

Missing are the implications behind those figures: Among the remaining 55%, how many are 10-year-olds who said they're 16?

Then there are the heavily polished statements, which make me feel as though I'm watching a remake of Reefer Madness. There's this from Ad Council president and CEO Peggy Conlon: "The popularity, easy accessibility and social acceptance of the Internet, particularly social networking sites, among teenagers can put them in a dangerous situation. It's our hope that this campaign will educate teenage girls and their parents about the potential dangers of offering personal information on the Internet."

This coupled with a statistic saying that, of all those in the NCMEC survey who said they've been propositioned online, 70% were girls.

How am I supposed to digest this? Suppose the threat at hand was not my child being sexually solicited, but being shot at by drive-by gunmen on a city street - which to me as a parent seems just as deadly. Suppose this nation were plagued with drive-by shootings - a kind of urban warfare in which territories were staked out and self-appointed leaders within those territories arbitrarily put others' lives at risk. I know it might be difficult to imagine, but think this through with me, if you would.

Suppose I were the father of ten kids - seven girls, three boys. And we're all walking down the sidewalk, oblivious to the dangers around us. Along comes a suspicious looking vehicle. It slows down. The tinted window slowly opens. I'm not certain what it is that pokes its muzzle out the top. Do I shout, "Girls, get down!...Boys, you'll be okay?"

Even as a parent of just one daughter, I am not moved by this 70% statistic. It does not do this noble cause a service to pretend that it only impacts girls, even if the image of the sweet and innocent girl in a petticoat was proven in a laboratory to touch our emotions more readily than some boy in a Nike T-shirt. I'm reminded of the huge billboards along I-44 in Missouri that feature a pristine little doll-like girl dressed in a blue petticoat and ribbons tied in a bow, like the talking doll from The Twilight Zone, above the caption, "Pornography Destroys Families." If there were a little boy in that picture, would people still read the billboard the same way?

And anyone who takes that 70% figure too seriously doesn't know boys. If you were a 12-year-old boy, and you had been sexually propositioned online - perhaps by someone you know - would you say so in a survey? Quick, show of hands of all you guys who were felt up by your basketball coach?

What would be the weight of that 70% figure on the public conscience if it were to be contrasted against just one story of one tormented boy? For him, being among the 30% provides no comfort.

The campaign to make parents aware of the fact that they should be aware of their children's online activities, should not be some political anti-pornography campaign, but a battle for the parents' souls. This is a war, and the perpetrators who illicitly seek out our children's attention are few but extremely and disproportionately powerful. They are terrorists and they are neighbors. So this war won't be won by propaganda, by questionable statistics, or by focus-group-tested references to images that evoke knee-jerk reactions.

That said, it should not be the Attorney General or the Ad Council or the President of the United States at the front lines of this war. It should be us parents. If we would just switch on the technology we have at our disposal, and switch on our oversight and micro-management ability, we may yet save our children from a lifetime of hurt and anguish and shame. Yes, this means censorship, where the fathers and mothers are the censors. Judge Reed was right, and yesterday's press conference only underscored his findings: The technological tools we have at our disposal are far more effective than any law or regulation or even ad campaign. But they are also useless insofar as their owners are incapable or unwilling to put them to proper use.

And just for the record: All ten of those kids would have been trained to lie flat on the concrete. But they'd be wearing steel-plated body armor.

Scott Fulton is solely responsible for his content. The views expressed here are his own, and are not necessarily the views of BetaNews.