Sunday, 30. July 2006, 16:58:13
The
US Congress are at it again. Another
law attempts to protect children using the internet. This time the target is social networking sites and chat rooms, where children (and adults for that matter) can be approached and drawn into something bad.
It looks good for a politician to say "I'm taking concrete action to look after the children of [insert your home here]". Who in their right mind doesn't support the idea of protecting children from evil? But does this law really healp, or is it just like trying to lock them in Rapunzel's tower?
Children are inquisitive. They are, at their best, naturally inclined to learn about what it is to be an adult - those mythical figures who earn their own money, don't have an enforced bedtime, don't have to ask if they can go to a friend's house, and apparently have the kind of wisdom that makes "because I said so" a rational argument.
At some point they discover that among the things adults do which are forbidden to children is the one that caused them to exist in the first place. In our marketing-driven culture, it's hard not to learn that people do this because they enjoy it, and fortunately many discover it as an expression of love, a gift that people can offer again and again, and moreover one that comes from themselves, not from a shop.
Children are often sociable, friendly, and we try to teach them that giving is a positive thing. Shops, offices, homes, are filled with artwork that is not very good, but proudly displayed because it is a gift from a child.
As individuals we try to protect those we love from harm, and that naturally includes our children. We try to teach them to avoid the dangers in the world, from being hit by a car while crossing the road to being struck down by nasty diseases caused by smoking. Parents make an effort to know what their children are doing, to ensure that they are safe.
As a society we try to extend that protection to all the members of society. To do so, we make some very arbitrary decisions. We set age limits on all kinds of things, from leaving school to seeing violent films. We try to give people enough education to enable them to survive as independent adults and discourage them from surviving by stealing, from coping with difficulties by taking drugs we consider harmful.
None of these mechanisms are perfect, but that in itself does not mean they are unimportant. What we do try to ensure is that there is a reasonable balance between the freedom to live an independent and fulfilling life, making a sufficient contribution to the society so it can continue to function, and providing effective protection for society at the cost of restricting the lives of individuals - or in some societies by taking the lives of individuals.
From Algeria to Afghanistan to America, from Norway to Nuie to New Zealand, people have different ideas of the best way to do this, and governments have more or less success in reflecting those desires in the structures that they create. The key is to ensure that whatever we do is an effective part of maintaining that balance.
To return to this law then. Is it going to achieve its stated goal, or is there a better way? Does it respect the need for freedom and help ensure people can achieve their goals in life (and our goals for them)? Does it recognise the realities of the world or is it based on assumptions whose unrealistic nature dooms it to failure? In short, does it meet that test of effectively maintaining the balance?
The American Library Association
did not think so. In their
submission (PDF 34kb) they pointed out that social networking provides an enormous value to education, and that the proposal paints a distorted view of the internet. I am certain that among the 65,000 members of the assocation not all of them are the wonderful people we would like our librarians to be, but equally sure that the overwhelming majority of them are in fact people who understand a lot about children.
I think they are correct. Not all parents are wonderful. Not all children will avoid being killed by cars. Not everyone will avoid smoking, or any of the thousands of other dangers in life. But this law will not stop inquisitive children from meeting inventive predators, nor even (in my opinion) significantly hinder the process. It will not teach children how to protect themselves from falling into such situations. It will reduce their ability to learn, by reducing many children's opportunities for educational social interaction. This is a net loss for socety, and a serious one.
There are nasty things, nasty people, nasty situations on the internet, just as there are in the physical world. There are more powerful ways of creating barriers, of making it clear to people that they are going to a dangerous place, and making it difficult to get in. They are not perfect. But they are, I believe, more effective than simplistic legislation.
One of the simplest and best-known today is "tagging". We can tell our children not to go to this or that dangerous place, but by the time they learn to read we can teach them that a variety of signs mean a place is dangerous and should be avoided. In the long run this is far more helpful. (Funnily enough, it is something that has long been advocated and adopted by large sections of the adult entertainment industry and by many schools and libraries).
Paedophilia is widely agreed to be evil and bad for children (although it wasn't always so), and the sexual predator in the park looking for little children is a familiar figure in the shared nightmares of our society. I grew up being warned about "danger stranger" and that the toilets at the park were a place where some men looked for children to do things that we probably wouldn't want to do. (I never saw any of these people, but their graffiti messaging system was familiar from similar examples in universities and libraries I had been to).
I had a very good teacher in primary school who was a known paedophile. I don't recall the details, but I knew at the time that no chldren were to be left alone with him. What I didn't realise until very much later is that another (not very good) teacher of mine was also a paedophile. I only discovered this because someone else's child discovered, too late, the very very hard way.
We cannot protect ourselves from all risks, and we cannot protect others from all danger. As adults, we freely and consciously engage in risk-taking behaviour, and children also do this. We can try to provide some basic protections, like ensuring that people are not driving cars in suburban streets so fast that it is impossible to stop if a child runs onto the road, or providing a raft of sanctions and proactively attempting to protect our children from sexual predators (or any other kind of sexual activity). But unless we equip them to make sensible decisions, by understanding the nature of the world, we are doing them a disservice and leaving them more vulnerable than ever to those who have found a way around our simple-minded approach.
I'm not a US citizen, I do not live there. It is not my place to decide, for them, how their society should run its own affairs. But I do hope that this law doesn't make it through the political process to become the law of their land, because I think it will harm the American people, and by further isolating them from the rest of the world will eventually have a negative global impact.
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