Protect Students From Internet Porn
Star Tribune, July 2, 1998
By Katherine Kersten

It's not often that feminist leaders, clergy, business people, and rank-and-file citizens come together in a public policy consensus. Yet that's what's happened over the past few decades in the fight to restrict the availability of pornography.

It's been a criminal offense for years, of course, to sell or distribute pornography -- or even prurient, sexually explicit images -- to children under 18. (The Minnesota legislature has deemed such images "harmful to minors.") In 1988, the legislature went further, requiring merchants to place opaque covers over sexually oriented magazines so kids wouldn't view them while buying gum at the Holiday Store.

But the public policy consensus has been most evident in the zoning ordinances that American cities have used to confine "adult" book and video stores to increasingly limited areas of town.

These ordinances, among other things, aim to keep pornography away from places where children and families congregate. Minneapolis, for example, prohibits adult bookstores within 500 feet of a school or public library; St. Paul bans them within 400 feet. In New York City, a zoning ordinance effectually shutting down 146 of the city's 164 x-rated businesses has just survived legal challenge.

But overnight, something has happened to end-run the consensus by which pornography's blight is being contained. In 1998, the most pernicious smut is no longer 500 feet away from our schools and libraries -- it is right within their walls. What has brought it to these sacrosanct places, where we have always deemed our children safest? The much-celebrated "information highway," the Internet.

Just what, courtesy of the Internet, is now a few clicks away from our children's curious gaze? It's real-time video sex of the kinkiest sort, along with gang rapes, images of women being sexually tortured, and sex with animals. It's stories, too -- nauseatingly brutal accounts of little boys being castrated, little girls being flagellated -- and a sewer of "bulletin boards" run by pedophiliacs and sadomasochists.

In a supreme irony, Internet sex -- on the whole -- is far more depraved than the stuff now banned by law from Times Square. Any nut in any basement in the world can post his most prurient fantasies on the Internet, driven by the desire to "one-up" his fellow perverts.

But there's another reason. Adult bookstore owners tend to monitor themselves, fearing prosecution for obscenity. But Internet purveyors can operate anonymously. By using free sites to attract browsers to pay sites, they make piles of money catering to "niche" tastes that adult businesses dare not meet.

Cyberfilth is everywhere on the Net. According to Randy Barrett of "Interactive Week Online," pornography is "arguably the most active and lucrative area of digital commerce in cyberspace..., [a] highly charged market of approximately 10,000 sites generating about $1 billion in revenue...." By design, smut is easy to access both intentionally and accidentally. Young people may stumble across it when entering the most innocent of words in a search engine.

Today, our public libraries and schools are scrambling to wire every nook and cranny to the Internet. You'd think they'd make protecting children from "assault by pornography" a primary goal. Think again.

The American Library Association is in the forefront of the movement to stop protective efforts. Minors, it insists, have the same rights as adults to sexually provocative material. The ALA frowns on efforts -- even by school libraries -- to block sexually-oriented web sites, require parental or teacher permission to use resources, or even flag objectionable material with warning labels. Last year, Minnesota school librarians led a (successful) charge against a bill to require state schools to use software to block Internet sex sites from kids' view.

Not all libraries share the ALA's views. But Hennepin County Library does. Its policy is to provide all patrons with the "greatest possible access to the Internet." "Only parents and guardians," it claims, "have the right to define what materials or information is consistent with their own personal and family beliefs."

One library official justified the policy this way: "A library is not a babysitter.... I would rather risk exposing a child to something that might be inappropriate [!!] than allowing them to lose that intellectual freedom, which is a fundamental democratic right."

This is a preposterous statement. Children have no legal right to view pornography, at a library or anywhere else. Indeed, the law imposes a duty on libraries -- and on society generally -- to protect children from pornography.

Hennepin County Library officials object that filters designed to screen smut will block access to legitimate sites on topics like breast cancer and -- horrors -- Super Bowl XXX. In fact, today providers like America Online can block sex sites without affecting others, while filtering software can be easily disabled for patrons whose needs require it.

Library officials put the burden to monitor kids on parents, knowing full well that parents can't always be there. They point to the library's kiddie work stations, which few teens would touch with a ten-foot pole. Meanwhile, they thoughtfully provide "privacy screens" -- akin to the peep-shows being cleaned out of Times Square -- where teens are likely to be found instead.

The Supreme Court has held that parents are entitled to the State's support in carrying out their parental responsibilities. In "Ginsberg v. New York," a landmark 1968 case, the Court observed that, "[w]hile the supervision of children's reading may best be left to their parents, ... parental control or guidance cannot always be provided...." Society itself has a "transcendent interest" in children's welfare, and so may pass laws to "safeguard them from abuses which might prevent their growth into free and independent well-developed ... citizens."

"Progressives" -- including, presumably, many who set Hennepin County Library policy -- frequently profess their concern for children. They are happy to use the full power of the law, for example, to keep cigarettes out of children's hands -- and to shell out $1/2 billion in attorneys' fees in the process.

"It takes a village to raise a child," these folks like to remind us. But when it comes to vicious and exploitative pornography, tough bounce, Mom and Dad, you're on your own.

That doesn't cut it. Libraries -- public and school -- are repositories of the public trust, and stewards of public resources. Taxpayers' investment to wire them to the Internet raises a corollary responsibility: to protect users, young and old, from pornographic exploitation.

-- Katherine Kersten is a director of Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis and a commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."