In today’s post Cold War post dot.com world there are spectres other than nuclear war to frighten us. Very topically, these include how paedophiles can use the Internet to penetrate the defences we put up to guard our children against ever experiencing that very strange love.
Media comment on the evils of the Internet has become especially shrill since the tragic events at Soham, England, though in truth coverage of technology-related subjects has become ever more negative as the year has progressed.
To take just a few examples: In May 2002 a Sunday Independent columnist vented her frustration at receiving unsolicited pornographic e-mail and at the fact that the police were powerless to take action. She has returned to this topic in the interim and has promised to do so again.
In July 2002 there was much publicity given to the preliminary findings of an EU-commissioned report on Internet safety which suggested that 24 per cent of children between the ages of eight and 17 have accidentally encountered pornography while online and that 86 per cent of young Irish Internet users who use chatrooms, had been asked for a face-to-face meeting with someone they met online.
Cyberworld of evil
The abduction of the two ten-year old Soham girls in August 2002, according to an Irish Times columnist: ‘should finally confirm that we have arrived in a cyberworld of evil for which we are hopelessly unequipped.’ Thanks to new technology, he continued, ‘paederasts…are now everywhere, in every house in Ireland, and in every child’s bedroom which has a computer.’
To be fair, each of these topics on their own are worthy of some concern, but even taking them together, are they really deserving of the level of anxiety they seem to be causing to media commentators?
The Internet differs from traditional media in the ease with which information, including pornography, can be generated and disseminated to any computer, and the interactive capabilities that allow communication between strangers whose real identity can be misrepresented.
In the first case, the argument that exposure to graphic sex will harm young people and therefore should be tightly restricted has been lost, if not invalidated.
38% have access
With only 38 per cent of Irish adults having access to the Internet, according to the latest research from Amarach, an Irish household is much more likely to have a second television set, complete with cable access to a host of programmed content, than a PC with an Internet connection.
The result is that your teenage son or daughter is much more likely to encounter a Eurotrash feature on a rubber fetish rockband, or a no-holds-barred fly-on-the-wall documentary of what can be expected on teenage holidays in Ibiza, than he, or in these ‘modern times’ perhaps even she, is to surf through porn sites on the household’s only land line.
With regard to the interactivity which in theory allows paedophiles to misrepresent themselves to children and arrange to meet them in real life (so called Internet grooming), it is important to recognise the threat for what it is without being terrified into paranoia.
A visitor to a Website cannot identify a child’s real name, home address, or even country of origin unless that information is volunteered to them. Children have to be educated to the procedure that you do not volunteer personal information on the Internet in the same way that my (and subsequent) generations were educated never to enter a strange person’s car or house.
Belittle not
This is not to belittle the dangers posed by the abuse of the Internet by paedophiles. It is rather an attempt to put matters into perspective.
Perhaps we can take heart from research from Penn State University in the US last April which showed that over a period of three years the ratio of Web queries on the subject of sex from a sample of 200,000 people dropped from one in six searches to one in 12.
Also in the US, the Girl Scout Research Institute reported in March that 84 per cent of teenage girls it polled said that when determining what was safe online, they ‘used their own common sense’. Good for them.
A generation of children equipped with the common sense to distinguish right from wrong based on a realistic appraisal of what is possible when using the Internet will do more to counter the threat of paedophiles than any number of over anxious articles from an older generation struggling to come to terms with a part of modern living that was absent from their own childhood.
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