Internet Online Summit: Focus on Children

This conference was held in Washington, D.C., on Dec 1-3, 1997

3. Benefits & Risks

In 1996, 4 million children accessed the Internet from home, double the number from the year before. Recently, this number has been reported to have increased to 10 million, and is expected to exceed 20 million by the year 2002. The Internet is not a passing fad, like hula hoops or pet rocks. It will continue to grow because those who go online find it incredibly useful.

Nevertheless, it is important for this growth to take place safely. The vast majority of our 70 million U.S. children don't access the Internet from home. To reach its full potential, families as a whole must be encouraged to get online. But this won't happen unless the Internet industry can demonstrate to families that their children can venture into cyberspace safely. This is not an issue of public relations. It is an issue of substance, key to the growth of the Internet.

Although many of the risks encountered in cyberspace also exist in the "physical world," the interactive nature of the Internet - especially when the children often understand more about the Internet than their parents, teachers, librarians, and other care givers - makes it harder to protect our children online. In addition, many common sense measures used in the "physical world," are not applicable in the cyberworld. A pedophile could not enter a schoolyard disguised as a child, but can easily pretend to be a child in an online chat room. A child who could not browse through Hustler in a convenience store can view sexually-explicit images online, legal or illegal. For the Internet to develop its full potential, these risks must be realistically addressed.

The following areas are of substantial concern to parents and other care givers:

Access by pedophiles to children:

There are recurring press reports of pedophiles using chat rooms (note 2) to lure children into physical meetings. According to a recent national newspaper report, chat rooms are the most popular activity for children online, yet most chat rooms are unsupervised. Many are "private," accessible only by invitation and special passwords (which may be provided to children by e-mail or "instant-type" messages to the screen of a targeted child).

Through use of chat rooms, adult strangers can have direct one-to-one access to our children. The "safe" home setting, combined with our children's natural trust, may lead them to forget that these people are strangers. This makes it easier for the pedophile to prey on children who would never talk to a stranger in the "real world."

Police investigators report that when they identify themselves as teenaged girls in chat rooms they are frequently approached by strangers making sexual advances. In addition, pedophiles have created a community online, where they can validate their behavior with other like-minded individuals and share information and "tricks of the trade."

Access by children to pornography:

Pornography which is legally restricted to adults in the physical world can easily be accessed by children on the Internet. Also, children can easily access obscene materials, which are illegal even for adults in the United States. Children can be exposed to this content intentionally or unintentionally and can also receive unsolicited links to adult sites.

Children can inadvertently view sexually-explicit content in several ways:

• Mistaken or mistyped URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) (note 3): The press reported the NASA.gov and NASA.com confusion, where many children seeking the Mars Mission photos found themselves confronted with a banner pornography site and direct free links to hard core sexual photos. While that site has been shut down, it is not an isolated incident and other such examples still exist.
• The constant need to say "no." Using common search engines to lookfor quite innocent information often brings in links to pornographic sites as well - for example, searches for "toys,""pets,""boys,""girls," and even "Barney®" (the purple dinosaur) all bring links to porn sites among others. The need to constantly say "no" battles with a child's natural curiosity.
• Misdirected searches: Many search engines use hidden computer code to identify sites, relying on keywords and descriptions which are coded by the website operators, but are not visible to the people viewing the site. Again, in an effort to increase traffic to their sites (and thus advertising revenue), pornographic website operators use popular terms. When children search for favorite search terms, these sites pop up along with the sites the children are searching for. The website traffic statistics don't distinguish between an adult hit and a child's hit.
• "Push" pornography and e-mailed links. With recent developments intechnology, content can be "pushed" to intended recipients either through special interactive applications, such as Java® and Active X®, or as links contained in e-mail. Children open their e-mail and find direct access to adult content sites. Some browsers display enclosed images automatically. These e-mails may bear subject lines that can be very deceptive, and children can't determine their contents merely by looking at the subject line.
• If a child, out of curiosity or carelessness, clicks on such links, the result will often be either a pornographic image (such as a commercial website "freebie") or heavy four-letter language (for example, in the description of newsgroup or website contents). Once children are exposed to the material, it can never be erased from their minds.

Distribution of child pornography:

Child pornography is different from other pornography, and consequently receives more stringent legal treatment. It is distinguished as an issue of child abuse - in its production and/or in the way it is used by pedophiles to desensitize their victims. The growth of the Internet has provided child pornographers with a distribution vehicle which is perceived to be relatively anonymous. In its project "Innocent Images," FBI personnel acknowledged earlier this year (note 4) that the bureau has a database of at least 4,000 cases of child pornography being distributed online.

Much of the media message to parents has been devoted to the dangers, as opposed to the educational and communication benefits, of the Internet. It must be remembered that the Internet is composed mainly of "good" content, which is one reason why the potential of the Internet is so exciting. Pornography sites make up only a small fraction of the sites on the Internet. The percentage of pornographic to good content doesn't tell the whole story, however, since the "bad apples" are the most heavily accessed (note 5).

Everyone agrees that it is important for families not to have reason to be frightened away from the Internet. It is, therefore, incumbent on the Internet industry, responsible corporations and commercial sites to work with parents, educators, advocacy groups and law enforcement to create a safe online environment for children.

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