Youth, Pornography, and the Internet (2002) / Chapter Skim
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10. Social and Educational Strategies to Develop Personal and Community Responsibility
10. Social and Educational Strategies to Develop Personal and Community Responsibility
Pages 218-257
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From page 218... ...
choice. Indeed, it has been frequently mentioned to the committee that those who really want to obtain inappropriate sexually explicit material on the Internet will generally find ways of doing so, circumventing all technological measures to curtail access to such material.
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From page 219... ...
Anonymity in particular (as would be true in an environment that does not require individual logins, and as is true for much Web surfing) enables individuals to escape responsibility and to avoid negative consequences for inappropriate behavior.2 In any event, encouraging youngsters to become principled persons is no easy task.
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From page 220... ...
These principles and values can serve to help a child judge what is or is not reasonable in a context broader than the immediacy of pleasure and pain, of "getting caught" or "getting away with it." Indeed, an approach based primarily on punishment presupposes that children engaging in inappropriate behavior will be caught misbehaving. As a practical matter, detection of such behavior will often not occur, especially if those children seek to remain undetected.
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From page 221... ...
These strategies include activities that educate parents and young people on Internet use and address a variety of issues arising from online use, such as how to reduce exposure to inappropriate material and how to give young people skills to mitigate any possible effects they might experience from encountering sexually explicit or inappropriate material online. Through its deliberations and on the basis of testimony and other information received, the committee has found that social and educational strategies are foundational for children's safe, effective, and appropriate use of the Internet.
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From page 222... ...
Information and media (I/M) literacy Compelling content Media campaigns Active, in-person supervision of child's Internet use Help provided by sibling or peer mentor acting as guide to child's use of the Internet Statement explicating in detail what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable use of the Internet and what consequences flow from the latter Explicit instruction on what constitutes safe Internet behavior and how to recognize dangerous, inappropriate situations Facility in using critical reasoning skills to obtain information sought and to evaluate the content of information that .
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From page 223... ...
Furthermore, those who really want to disseminate inappropriate materials or find inappropriate materials on the Internet have proven adept at circumventing technology-based solutions. As the technology improves, so also do its circumventers, in a never-ending game of action and reaction.
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From page 224... ...
Those who are determined are bound to find ways to circumvent any technological measures; to the extent that social and educational strategies can reduce the desire and motivation for seeking out inappropriate material or engaging in inappropriate activities, such behavior can be reduced. When technological protection does not work, or when it is not present, the individual involved must rely on his or her own internal resources to cope with the issue, whether it is in choosing to refrain from "getting into trouble" or knowing how to cope with whatever trouble arises.
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From page 225... ...
Moreover, the benefits that accrue from effective social and educational strategies go far beyond protecting children and youth from inappropriate sexually explicit material. They have relevance to many situations that individuals are likely to encounter, both online and offline, and will help them to navigate their Internet experiences with confidence and wisdom.
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From page 226... ...
Also, parents who do not know the routes through which their children can be exposed to such inappropriate material and dangerous experiences may be excessively fearful because they lack perspective on the ease or frequency with which such exposures might occur. It is noteworthy that a Pew Internet and American Life survey found that parents who do not use the Internet themselves generally tend to be more concerned for their children's Internet safety than parents with more online experience.5 Parents also learn from more experienced parents, child-care workers, and pediatricians, about age-appropriate "harm prevention" steps to take in homes: remove lead paint; install child-resistant clips on drawers where chemicals, knives, or guns are kept; install child-resistant covers for electric outlets; teach children never to use the stove without an adult 5Pew Internet Project.
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From page 227... ...
· Parents can explicitly provide instruction and guidance to their children about inappropriate activities and explain why their viewing of sexually explicit materials may be inappropriate. Parents at one committee site visit went so far as to argue that the best way to educate children about inappropriate sites was to show them some inappropriate sites and engage in a conversation with them about why they were inappropriate.
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From page 228... ...
When time is constrained, people are more likely to concentrate on the activities that they value most highly. To the extent that children seek out inappropriate material out of idle curiosity, these are the activities that are most likely to be curtailed in the presence of time limits.
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For example, a parent who views sexually explicit imagery online may well leave traces of such viewing available for his or her child to find later. This may be quite all right if the parent would not object to his or her child seeing such material.
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Providing such dialogs is beyond the scope of this report, but resources must be made available to help parents address such issues. Box 10.4 provides some speculations on ideas for promoting parental education (and Internet safety education, which is discussed in Section 10.8.1)
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Youth involved in mentoring programs, in fact, have been shown to be less likely to experiment with drugs, less likely to be physically aggressive, and less likely to skip school than those not involved in such programs. Peer mentors provide the important extra support that many younger people need to make it through a difficult period in their lives when peer pressure and the desire to fit in are strong influences....
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From page 234... ...
Thus, peer assistance is likely to be most effective in steering children away from, say, would-be child molesters or racist or hate sites. However, if the peer assisters themselves do not believe that exposure to adult-oriented, sexually explicit material is a big deal (as may be the case for some individuals)
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. AUPs vary, but they almost always contain provisions against viewing sexually explicit Web sites, and perhaps other kinds of material (e.g., instructions for bomb making, hate sites)
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236 YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET As a rule, AUPs are most effective when they are developed in conjunction with parents, community members, teachers, school library media experts, school administrators, and students. AUPs developed jointly with the school and community are more likely to incorporate the particular sensibilities of parents and can be designed to address specific concerns, resulting in higher degrees of buy-in, acceptance, and legiti
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SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL STRATEGIES 237 macy. For example, one community may be more concerned about the exposure of young people to sexually explicit material while another might worry more about the consequences of young people spending time in chat rooms.
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(In this regard, the problem raised by AUPs is similar to those raised by any honor code.) However, technical tools for monitoring Web usage in the aggregate (without indi
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For example, the prohibitions on viewing sexually explicit adult Web sites complement the restrictions imposed by filters that block many but not all such sites. Thus, a student who takes advantage of underblocking in a filter to reach a sexually explicit adult Web site is still subject to sanctions for violating the AUP.
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From page 240... ...
Perhaps the most important point for adults to keep in mind is that many children may be better able to handle exposure to inappropriate material than adults give them credit for. As noted in Chapter 5, most of the older teenagers with whom the committee spoke reported that today much of the sexually explicit material they encountered online was not a big deal to them.
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From page 241... ...
A second strategy is to seek help independently, though knowing how to obtain help is sometimes difficult. For example, some ISPs provide methods for reporting of spam e-mail, whether they involve inappropriate sexually explicit material or other kinds of material, harassing instant messages (IMs)
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While many students to whom the committee spoke said that they learned to be safe on the Internet through experience, explicit Internet safety education (ISE) provides children with dos and don'ts that decrease the likelihood that they will have an unsafe experience online.
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From page 243... ...
(An e-mail from hotsexybabe~example.com with the subject line "best porn on the Net" is highly likely to be spam containing links to adult-oriented, sexually explicit material.) Such e-mail can be easily deleted without being read, and an informed user who chooses to read the e-mail is reading sexually explicit material more or less voluntarily.
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. For example, a number of Girl Scout merit badges related to computers and the Internet could easily and naturally accommodate a requirement for Internet safety.
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10.8.2 Information and Media Literacy Information literacy refers to a set of abilities that enables people to "recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information."25 An informationliterate individual is able to determine the information needed, find the needed information effectively and efficiently, evaluate the information received, and assess its sources critically; incorporate selected information into his or her knowledge base; use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose; understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information; and access and use information ethically and legally.26 Media literacy, a newer term, expands on information literacy in two primary ways.27 First, media literacy extends to information presented in all forms of media, not just print. Information literacy was never specifically restricted to print, but in practice it is often understood in that primary context.
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From page 246... ...
Information and media literacy offers a set of cognitive skills that can protect against misleading information or a disturbing image by teaching young people how to recognize underlying messages, criticize them, and develop productive counternarratives. Skills related to the critical evaluation of information are not explicitly related to reducing the exposure of youth to inappropriate sexually explicit material on the Internet.
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From page 247... ...
The significance of such literacy in the context of evaluating content found on the World Wide Web is obvious, where a good deal of Web content is not reliable or accurate by any standard. But media literacy also has relevance to an adolescent who may be exposed to inappropriate sexually explicit materials, either deliberately or inadvertently.
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From page 248... ...
Another study focused on girls in their early teens, instructing them in how to think critically about media messages regarding how women should think about romance, love, and sexuality.32 They responded by criticizing the media because they felt the media encouraged them to focus too much on romance and trying to attract men. If such studies can be generalized, helping youth to understand how and whv sexually explicit adult-ori .J .J 1 31A.I.
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For application in a mass education environment, a variety of schools have adopted educational standards that address certain information and media literacy skills. For example, the state of Wisconsin has adopted learning standards that call for fourth graders to be able to use Web sites that have been preselected and bookmarked by the teacher, eighth graders to know effective search strategies, and twelfth graders to be able to evaluate Internet content for validity and reliability as well as to assess the search engines for effectiveness and the way in which they return information.33 10.8.3 Collateral Issues Internet safety education and information and media literacy can be regarded as elements of a comprehensive approach to education in which the use of technology is fully integrated with pedagogical goals.
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A generalization of this strategy would call for the creation of Internet content that is compelling and educational for young people, so compelling that they are less inclined to spend their time searching for inappropriate material or engaging in inappropriate or unsafe activities. Material that is productive, stimulating, and developmentally beneficial could include more Web sites devoted to sexual health and education so that 34For example, the CyberSmart!
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Major commercial sources have the resources to experiment with different approaches to their online offerings, an important characteristic in a new environment in which successful formulas for engaging children with healthy Web content are largely unknown. From their physical-world presence, they also have brand recognition (e.g., Disney, Nickelodeon, and Sesame Street)
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, sports, computers, and entertainment, as well as information for parents, teachers, and children for Internet safety. The theory is that young people would choose to go to these sites and portals voluntarily, which in turn would keep them away from adult material.
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Good content can also draw on a scientific understanding of the developmental needs and milestones of children in cognitive, social, emotional, and moral dimensions. For example, based on such research, schools in Wisconsin have developed Internet-related educational objectives that students must meet by the end of certain years and that teach skills such as effective searching and how to evaluate online content for truthfulness and validity.
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From page 254... ...
would help to keep young people away from inappropriate sexually explicit material (as well as other types of inappropriate material) by providing a venue that children preferred.
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Do you know where your kids are? " A similar campaign today for Internet safety might offer a message like, "What did your kids do online today?
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From page 256... ...
Another possibility is that strategies, along the lines of current campaigns to discourage drug and tobacco use among children, could be designed to discourage children from seeking out sexually explicit materials. Such strategies are likely to be controversial, in the sense that they would call public attention to sexually explicit materials.
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From page 257... ...
While it is true that Internet safety education, acceptable use policies, and even parental guidance and counseling are unlikely to change the desire of many adolescent boys to seek out sexually explicit materials, parents are more aware of some of the other dangers (such as meeting strangers face-to-face) and know more about how to protect their kids then ever before.
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