children accessing porn; adults turning off filterware (was Re: Selection)

[Albert Lunde]

I'd like to remind people again that there are big gray areas. One of these
might be better described as "youth accessing sexually explict information"
than "children accessing porn".

It's my opinion that teens (and pre-teens, if they are looking for it),
deserve access to explicit information about sex education, contaception,
and safer sex. Especially in the case of teens with bisexual or homosexual
inclinations, this information might literally be a matter of life and
death importance (because of HIV and teen suicide rates).

On the other hand, while I think this information is vital, I think the
record of public debate demonstrates that there is no national consensus on
what teens should be allowed to see. There are people who feel that it is
important to protect youth from information about homosexuality (or
abortion or various other things), there are others who feel, like me that
they should have it.

The question is not merely how libraries should respond to the will of "the
public", but how to deal with complex cases where different parts of "the
public" are likely to disagree.

Another non-trivial question is "What is 'pornography'?".  By a free
reading of one of our more draconian laws some Japanese animation series,
might be classified as "child pornography", (because of excessive nudity).
This despite the fact that they originally aired in Japan as TV shows aimed
at a teen or pre-teen audience. Since the Internet is global, the
"community standards" of say, Japan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and the
USA are likely to bump into each from time to time.

The PICS framework deals with this sort of thing by allowing for lots of
rating scales. Still, it seems like at the moment, the most effort is going
into trying to produce some sort of US-centric least-common-denominator
rating scales.


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    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu