Andrew Worsdale
SO what if you’re a concerned parent who goes out one night and leaves your eight- year-old plugged into cyberspace? Is the child going to be exposed to all the variegations of sins of the flesh and/or revolutionary subversion?
If the child is naturally curious, all he has to do is call up a search engine and type in any key word from tits to ass or marijuana to patricide.
As an intrepid journalist I spent half an hour on the Net and found several sites which could prove intriguing to children and shocking to parents. The official “fistfucking” home page is easy to access and only requires the user to state that he is over the age of 18.
What follows after the warning is a graphic sight of what the Webmaster calls “elbow- riding” plus guidelines on how to practise this unique form of sex. The body modification e-zine – an e-mail magazine – features extreme images of tattoos, body- piercing, implants, surgical and non- surgical modification, and even a category called nullification.
Charles Haynes’s Radical Sex Page takes off from Pat Califia, who is quoted on the site as saying: “Being a sex radical means being defiant as well as being deviant.”
Possibly the best way for minors to gain access to pornography is through sex links pages like FREE Smutty Links, which features more than 500 links to “adult” pages ranging from A Porno Overdose to Zealous About Sex. Probably one of the kinkiest Web pages is the Handylinks site, which features erotic exploration ranging from bestiality to scatology.
But possibly more alarming to parents than tales of the flesh are sites like BOOOOOOOMMMMM!!!!, which explicitly guides one in the art of making explosives with the only warning: “For your safety we recommend you read the recipes closely two or three times before attempting. It is highly suggested that you have a background in chemistry or get an Introductary [sic] book of Chemistry.”
Other sites you might want to bar your kids from accessing are Ayuhuasca: King of Brews, which shows the user how to concoct a tea from yage, an Amazonian hallucinogen.
There are numerous other places where youngsters can get up-to-date information on drug use and abuse. Then there are the scary spiritual sites, including the Satanism archive which has a chapter devoted to exposing “Christian child abuse”.
The reality, however, is that most sites that might be “harmful” to children are either protected by passwords or age verification systems like Adult Check, where the user pays a fee (normally $9,95) to gain access to a plethora of sites over a period of a year.
Parents who are concerned can always install a DIY censorship system like Cyber Patrol or Net Nanny, which allow you to monitor, screen and block access to anything you wish. Another system called Net-Monitor keeps a log of all the pages that someone has accessed through your Web browser so that you can tell where your children (or spouse) are going on the Net.
But for all the hoopla, many experts believe there is no real danger for minors. Caroline Wright of South Africa’s Internet Solution says: “Sure it’s always a concern, but just as you’d monitor your kids at, say, the CNA or the porno rack at the local caf, so you should monitor what they’re accessing on the Net.
“It’s not for our company to play police. The Internet is a medium and we are just the conduit.”
Remember that even if you do block out pornographic or other seemingly offensive material, any eight-year-old or 10-year-old worth his cybersalt will be able to hack the programme anyway.
For more information on the Blue Ribbon Campaign dedicated to free speech on the Net, go to Drop Out Net! at http://www.uni- konstanz.de/~dierk/ censorship/censor.html or
http://smople.thehub.com.au/~rene/liberty/m
edia.html.
June
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