Lock on Porn

Rajni is aghast. She can hardly believe the report sent by her 12-year-old son’s teacher. He was found surfing pornographic sites on the Internet and downloading a collection of pictures that the teacher thought was ‘unsuitable’ for a 12-year-old. Rajni is at her wit’s end. She tries to keep tabs on the sites her son accesses at home, but what about sites he can visit at school and in the library?

Rajni’s concern is not merely her own. It is an issue that parents all over the world need to address. Keeping this mind, the U.S. Senate passed the Children’s Internet Protection Act late last year which requires schools and libraries to use a technology-based system on their computers to sieve out child pornography, obscenity on all computers and soft core pornography on computers used by children. This legislation allows local communities to decide what technology they want to use and what kind of information their children should have access to.

The U.S. initiative should encourage other countries to review their laws pertaining to Internet accessibility especially with regard to children.

Studies done by a couple of U.S. based companies reveal that the cyberspace scenario is quite frightening. According to a survey done by CNN.com, 75 percent of all Internet traffic is pornography related and one out of five children between the age groups of 10 and 17 who are online in the U.S. said they had received unwanted sexual solicitation during the past year.

With most developing countries becoming Internet friendly, the figures of children accessing or receiving pornographic matter online will only increase unless some sort of filtering mechanism is in place. Further, the CNN study said that 50 percent of children between 10 to 17-year-olds admitted to having seen pornography on web sites and that 79 percent of these children did so from their school or public libraries.

But, one cannot really blame it on peer groups. About 62 percent of all students included in the survey said they had stumbled upon porn unintentionally. And after the first encounter, 79 percent of these students had intentionally downloaded pornographic material. What was surprising was that 75 percent of these children’s parents said they knew what exactly their children were accessing. But, do you?

According to another survey made by an American magazine, Grip, the average age of a visitor to a pornographic site is 12 years. The magazine also found that using the word porn on a search engine throws up a massive list of three million sites to which around 7,500 to 10,000 pornographic sites are added everyday.