Reflections of a millennium mum

As Fiona Patten of the newly formed Australian Sex Party explains in The Sydney Morning Herald  (December 18, 2008) of her 1,500 members (both male and female) the majority are under the age of 30 - not exactly the voice of parents forced to navigate uncharted technical and moral territory brought on by the ever increasing pace of change which now characterises life.

With shock humour normalised in South Park and Family Guy we can forget that boundaries can and should exist and where to draw the line. The democratisation of the media via the internet has not led to a generation of politically active and aware teenagers, but a generation of politically switched off youth who would rather be in the news for throwing drug parties than organising protests against repression or injustice.

The civil libertarians, with their high ideals are not defending today’s dissidents but the ever more insidious ways in which exploitative and consumerist propaganda is leeched into the minds of our growing children: telling them what to buy in order to express their identities as the ideal consumer. If our capacity to think in terms of moral boundaries has been eroded, how then, can ethical decision making be taught or inspired if we do not bother to draw boundaries around behaviour of which we disapprove?

David Quilty, Managing Director of Public Policy with Telstra would have us believe the internet was founded on the ideal of free speech.

The internet was born out of freedom of speech. Child pornography is absolutely abhorrent, it’s insupportable. But when you start getting into grey areas, I think it’s very difficult to consider having governments deciding what people should and shouldn’t watch.(7:30 Report, November 24, 2008).

The internet was not born out of free speech; it was created by, and for, the US defence force as the answer to Russia’s launch of Sputnik. The internet was designed to be an indestructible network, resilient to attack and impervious to control.

From the same interview, Michael Malone, CEO of iinet would have us believe that his main concern is not the bottom line threatened by a potential decrease in transmission of illegal content, but with child safety. Malone compared the internet to a red light district and says parents should bear full responsibility for the consequences of this. “If you want to keep your children safe on the internet, the only way to achieve that is to actually sit with them while they’re on the internet. You wouldn’t drop your child at Kings Cross … you would walk through with them … ”

When the internet is taking over as a medium for more and more daily activities, continual supervision becomes increasingly unrealistic.

The report Little Children are Sacred (2007) from the Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, reveals that unsupervised internet access is precisely what has become the norm in remote communities where access to mainstream media is unavailable and access to cable television and the internet is the sole entertainment. The report outlines a normalisation of sexual violence in some communities that has become ingrained over recent history. Whether parental neglect from multiple causes has led to aberrant sexual norms or whether the availability of porn has contributed to the neglect of children in these communities is a chicken and egg question similar to all research that attempts to find causal connections between viewing pornography and/or violence and incidence of abuse.

A review of the literature on these matters drives home just how difficult it is to prove a “causal” link in social behaviour. Those who oppose technologies aimed at filtering internet and peer-to-peer content find this difficulty a convenient hook for their criticism. While official research might be some way from a conclusion on any causal link between the influence of technology and pornography on behaviour, recently released Victorian crime statistics show 15-19 year olds were more likely to be distributing pornographic images of themselves and others than any other age group (Sun Herald July 2, 2008).

While the answer to fighting such alarming trends in society may not begin and end with technology it does pose the question of where we do begin to address this? If we are not trusted with our own democracy; if we cannot trust our own intuition and common sense to debate and agree on a set of values for our society, then the industry-affiliated opponents to mandatory filtering are right that technology is not the answer. However it is certainly part of the problem and needs to be part of the solution especially given that the telecommunications industry reaps such a large profit from the sharing of this content.

The debate over internet censorship has brought us an opportunity to think about the technical and social worlds inhabited by our children (convergent as these are), as well as highlight the need to formulate boundaries within which our children can grow into their adult selves. Raising the issue of sexuality with children and rebellious teenagers creates certain challenges but also gives parents an opportunity to reconsider their own beliefs: to either discard or reinforce them. Society also has a role to play supporting parents to uphold their values, perhaps more so in this era of solipsistic nihilism than ever before.