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In UK, Search Engines Urged To Block More Online Porn Sites
An anonymous reader writes "Search engines such as Google should do more to restrict access to online pornography, a government adviser on child internet safety has said. John Carr said increasing the number of sites automatically blocked by search engines would make it more difficult for paedophiles to get images of abuse. It comes after Mark Bridger was found guilty of the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones in Powys." It sounds like a continuation of the blocked-by-default porn white-listing plan that's been going around in the UK for a few years now.
Yes, but there should be tools helping the parents in doing so.
The suggestion in the summary is mixing up two completely unrelated issues. Those issues must be addressed separately, otherwise we are going to end up with the wrong solution.
There may be people who do not want to see porn online and wish to be protected from that. That is fine, but it should be a voluntary decision. Unless the person is a minor, in which case it is the parents' decision. But in order to do this, you need to have the content classified. Now it boils down to who has to pay for maintaining this classification. You cannot just require the sites themselves to do that, because some of them will be outside your jurisdiction, and some of them may not have an interest in being correctly classified. Once you have the classification, getting it applied to the right set of people is not all that hard. But don't force it upon grown ups, who do not want it.
The other issue, which is completely unrelated, and should be treated as such, is the issue of child pornography. Many people are acting as if the main problem to be solved is that of people looking at such pictures. And as long as we can prevent anybody from looking at those pictures, then the problem has been solved. That is not true. All which has been achieved by that is hiding the real problem. The real problem is, that what is depicted took place in the first place. That pictures were taken of it and that somebody saw them did not make the abuse itself any worse for the kid, but in some cases it does help reveal that the abuse is taking place, which can help stopping it.
Current laws may actually do more to destroy evidence of crimes rather than stopping the crimes themselves. How would things change if possession and distribution of child pornography was legalized, but manufacturing and trading it remained illegal? Instead of interest organizations building up censorship, which is ultimately going to hurt more, when it is used for other purposes, those interest organizations could collect child pornography and perform data mining on it, and as soon as they have identified individuals in the images, they can hand that over to authorities. I believe that would do more to stop abuse of children, than the current laws.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Both John Carr and I have been involved in the foundation of Inhope.org. But ever since hotlines and online child protection came into fashion, there's been differences in policies in various countries in Europe. In the Netherlands, policy makers, service providers and volunteers have always had their focus on preventing and fighting (pictures of) online child abuse (aka "child pornography"). In the UK, the focus has been on protecting childrens poor souls from seeing things that policy makers think children should not see. Hence, they block the obvious porn sites, leaving only the more hidden and nasty sites for children to visit. Even the EU in the early 90's quickly switched from preventing online child abuse to blocking porn. There was plenty of subsidy from the EU to local hotlines (of which Meldpunt was the first and the Internet Watch Foundation second), but as the focus shifted, Meldpunt was party left out from the subsidies, because it kept its focus where it should be: preventing and fighting child sexual abuse.
Sex is part of life. Educating children about sex makes them better prepared for life as an adult. You can easily see that by comparing stats for porn intolerance and teen pregnancies. Holland has a very low teen pregnancy number. And if parents don't want their kids to see online sex, why can't we just leave that to parents?
Governments should spend tons of money catching the guys who sexually abuse children. They should not interfere with sexual education, let alone censor the internet.
no, I don't have a sig
It's amazing how quickly they leap from "porn" to "paedophiles". Just two paragraphs in, and both of them very short.
It used to be "gays == paedophiles" but they can no longer get away with that.