News for the Week of February 10, 2008
In youth-tech news this week, legal scholars debate whether self-produced child porn is a social or legal problem, or both.
Self-produced child porn
The troubling trend of teens voluntarily distributing pornographic pictures they have produced themselves was the topic of a University of Virginia Law School event entitled, "Self-Produced Child Pornography: The Appropriate Societal Response to Juvenile Self-Sexual Exploitation," the Virginia Law Weekly reports.
"Today's problem is tomorrow's epidemic," warned Professor Mary Leary of Catholic University. Leary asked if self-produced child porn is a social or legal problem, or both. She reportedly said "it is the duty and responsibility of the government to intervene in the continued sexual objectification and eroticization of children, even if self-produced, in the rehabilitative settings of the juvenile justice system." Prof. Stephen Smith of UVA said the ultimate goal is protecting children. "The role for criminal law should not include arresting and prosecuting these minors, but should be limited to rehabilitation..."
Causes, repercussions
A larger question posed by Smith was "why kids would behave in this manner. [Smith] pointed to the simple fact that we live in a sexualized society where teenagers have sex. The median age of the first sexual experience is 16 for boys, 17 for girls." And "before we decide to criminalize," [the third panelist, UVA Prof. Anne] Coughlin argued, "we must identify the additional harms created by the image. It is not enough to point to the harms created by other forms of child porn. Rather, we must specify what the harm is and who the victims are when consenting minors make images of and for themselves."
Finally, "[Coughlin] reminded the audience that American culture objectifies everybody, including children, who often receive mixed signals about the acceptability of their sexuality. Acknowledging that this is a serious social problem, Coughlin concluded that the criminal justice system was not an appropriate fix."
In other news...
- Ukrainian parental controls get top spot. To mark the fifth-annual Safer Internet Day, the European Union unveiled a three-year study it sponsored of parental controls software and services. In the study, the big-name brands in the US "were all beaten to the top spot by a small partnership that employs no more than 50 people, mostly designers and developers in Ukraine," the BBC reports. The partners who created Magic Desktop, a "walled garden" approach to online child protection, are a couple of fathers who developed it for their own kids. It's basically useful for children 10 and under because it's based on a "white list" of approved children's sites. The rest of the top 10 products are listed in a sidebar to the BBC piece.
- Library bans social sites for PC security. The Lexington County Public Library is banning social-networking sites, but not for the reasons most people would probably come up with. "The primary reason for the decision was research that shows social-networking sites can make computer systems vulnerable to viruses," reports The State in Columbia, S.C. "The sites are becoming prime targets for malicious hackers," it cites network security experts as saying. "The library hasn't encountered such problems, but library officials said they want to be proactive." This is another reminder of how important it is for home-based social networkers to be careful about what links they click on in comments, bulletins, etc., and about logging in more than once (some malicious hackers create fake log-in screens that grab user names and passwords).
- New game ratings for UK. Britain is working on a new game-ratings system to replace its old, unworkable one, The Guardian reports. "A legally enforceable cinema-style classification system is to be introduced for videogames in an effort to keep children from playing damaging games unsuitable for their age." The system will make it illegal to sell a game to a child below that game's recommended age (maybe not to a parent unaware of the game's rating?). Under the current system, videogames aren't affected by the UK's Video Recordings Act unless they depict "'gross' violence to humans or animals" or sex. Those require age limits, leaving "up to 90% of games on the market" rating-free. Some games are also classified voluntarily by a European system. "Policing such regimes is difficult as it is possible to buy games over the net and simply tick the box stating the purchaser is over 18."
- MySpace opens to widgetmakers. Like Facebook, MySpace has opened its doors to people who create parasitical little software applications for profiles on its site. It's offering developers tools to create these little apps riding on its "platform," the New York Times reports. Called "widgets," they can add a lot of fun and functionality to users' experience on MySpace and could make the site that much more "sticky" for its users. Adds the Times, "MySpace has always allowed users to embed external programs, sometimes called widgets, in their pages; companies like YouTube and Photobucket got their start on MySpace's back, in fact. But MySpace will now overtly endorse and attempt to nurture that widget ecosystem" and allow widgetmakers to make money from the applications they build.
