interview
How Can You Protect Your Child
from Internet Porn?
CBN.com –
CBN News anchor Lee Webb recently sat down with Internet safety
expert Donna Rice Hughes to discuss how parents can protect their
children from getting ensnared in the pornographer’s web.
LEE WEBB: Donna Rice Hughes is an internationally
known Internet safety expert and advocate. She is also the volunteer
president of Enough is Enough, an organization dedicated to making
the Internet safe for children and families.
Donna, let me begin by asking you about the new law. It has just
been introduced, and it already has an age verification provision
in it. The 1998 Child Online Protection Act already has that provision.
How is this any different?
DONNA RICE HUGHES: The previous law was passed
in 1998. However, it never did go into effect. In fact, it is
still being tied up in the courts. It's already been to the Supreme
Court twice, and will go back again. This law, in addition to
age verification, also sets up an excise tax where the pornographers
would be taxed themselves, and also sets up a fund for enforcement
of the law. So both of those are also very interesting, so we'll
see what Congress does because this other law is still enjoined
right now. I'm not sure what Congress will do with it until we
get a decision from the court.
WEBB: Is it your opinion that pornographers
are specifically targeting young people?
RICE HUGHES: They are targeting young people.
About 74 percent of them have free pictures on their Web site.
Only 3 percent require adult verification. So they actually need
a stick approach to do the right thing, and they trick kids into
getting to their sites. A child can type something as innocent
as ‘boys’ or ‘toys’ or ‘girls,’
or any number of words, and get routed to a porn site. And once
they get there, it's very difficult to get out of those sites,
because of what we call ‘mouse- trapping’ technology.
And they know the pornographer knows that if they can get a child
or adult into their site and keep them there long enough, there's
a good chance that they may be able to capture them as a consumer.
And what most parents don't understand is that the majority of
these sites have free pictures, so kids don't actually have to
pay for the material that they're seeing.
WEBB: Donna, how do you respond to parents who
say, you know, I want to make sure that my children are not looking
at pornography, but I don’t want to invade their privacy.
How would you respond to that parent?
RICE HUGHES: You have to. You have to understand
as a parent that pornographers are looking for your children.
They are after your kids, as are sexual predators, so you have
to be very aggressive, more aggressive than the pornographer,
in order to protect your children.
There's some very simple things that parents can do. For instance,
keeping the computer in a public area of the house. Still, 30
percent of parents are letting their kids have Internet connections
in their rooms. Fifty percent of parents are not using filtering
technology. Simply using a filter will screen out a lot of the
accidental access, and about 9 in 10 kids are accidentally coming
across this material when they're trying to do their homework
and looking for material that is, of course, not pornographic.
CBN IS HERE FOR YOU!
Are you seeking answers in life? Are you hurting?
Are you facing a difficult situation?
A caring friend will be there to pray with you in your time of need.
|
