Oh What a Tangled Web: Boys & Girls & Online Porn
by William Bole
Boys and Girls and Online Porn
By William Bole
At the time of Kenneth Starr's steamy report on the Monica Lewinsky affair, a number of press commentators counseled parents to keep their children off the Internet while the report was floating around. The advice, though meant well, was a bit naive.
For many children, the World Wide Web has begun to resemble the wide, wide world. Unplugging these kids from the Internet is sort of like grounding them. Like the physical world, the virtual one offers a bounty of enrichment and just plain fun. It also presents unfathomable risks. And the salacious details about President Clinton's extramarital relations barely begin to reveal the scope of the online peril.
Tracey O'Connell-Jay came to know the dark side of the web through a traumatic ordeal involving her half-sister. At 14, her sister was an honor student who didn't wear makeup, had never gone on a date, and stayed out of trouble. But she did know the Internet intimately. She spent hours behind closed doors at her uncle's computer next door. "We thought, Isn't it great? She's off doing research," recalls O'Connell-Jay, who is 34. Actually, the girl had fallen into an online relationship -with a 24-year-old Air Force enlisted man, which went off-line when he lured her away from her home at Christmas time 1996 and ended with the young girl on the posters of missing children. O'Connell-Jay, from her home at the other end of the country, in Southern California, forged a national rescue effort that lasted four months until co-workers recognized a picture of a pedophile shown on "The Maury Povich Show." The man had fled, with O'Connell-Jay's sister, to a small prison town (of all places) and taken a job in a cemetery.
The ending isn't happy. "When we brought her home, she wasn't the same. And she still isn't. We've been waiting for the emotional healing, and it hasn't happened," says O'Connell-Jay, who has a 13-year-old son and has created an Internet site (www.webwisekids.com) that offers information her family didn't have when her sister launched into cyberspace.
"It's like I lost my sister. He brainwashed her. He really made her believe her family was against her," O'Connell-Jay said, asking that her sisters name not be used in print, to avoid further trauma. "It's very painful for us as a family, still, now," she says.
Telling kids they can't log on to the Internet may be like telling them they can't go outside and play. But leaving children at the computer, unattended, as some have noted, is like dropping them off in Central Park and saying, "Go make some new friends."
Essentially, what has made the Internet a potentially dangerous place is the transmutation of sexual mores and, in particular, 40-plus years of pornography, beginning with the 1953 debut of Playboy magazine, according to Dr. Judith Reisman, a communications expert and president of the Institute for Media Education, in Sacramento, Calif.
"When you have a White House that looks like a bordello, then you can't be surprised that the images of a bordello have pervaded the social environment," Reisman argues. "Look at Monica Lewinsky [and Clinton]. Those are pornographic scenes they're engaged in. They're right out of a pornographic flick. The reason why it sounds like pornography [in the Starr report] is because it is pornography."
All this has been multiplied and intensified by the World Wide Web. "With a push of the button, you can become a sex addict almost instantly," says Reisman. "We are breeding sexual predators among our children. Every child now has a key to the brothel."
In the not-too-distant past, a mother and father might have worried about their boy sneaking a glimpse of the Playboy centerfold, and that was the extent of, anxiety over pornographic imagery In the Internet era, children have ready access to literally thousands of Internet sites with pictures of unspeakable acts involving children themselves and animals, as well as sexual torture. And in the age of Chippendales and male strip-pers, it's not just boys who are upping the stress levels of parents when it comes to obscene material.
As teenagers in the 1970s, Shyla Welch and countless other girls swooned over glossy pictures of a fully-clothed Bobby Sherman, the pop singer of passing celebrity, in Tiger Beat magazine. Today's teenage girls can more easily download nude shots of the late-90s heartthrob, "Titanic" star Leonardo DiCaprio (it just takes a few clicks of the mouse to find one).
One family left a friend's 13-year-old girl alone for less than half an hour at the family computer. When they later checked the record of recently visited sites, they were stunned to see posting after posting of hard-core porn.
Obviously, she had been to these places before, the husband said. It was really graphic stuff.
Other girls are posing nude for photographs snapped by boyfriends and posting them on the Internet. It's gently referred to as "art porn," to distinguish it from hard-core pornography, but Welch, spokes-woman for the anti-porn group Enough is Enough, is worried nonetheless.
"My real concern is that these girls are going to pay a very high price for this later. They'll have to explain why there are naked pictures of them floating around," says Welch, whose organization is based in Virginia. "They'll never get those pictures back. On the Internet, they exist forever."
Even the most casual browsing of the Web can lead a girl or boy into the Internet's red-light districts. In order to increase the number of hits or contacts on their sites, porn distributors may put any number of innocent words into their descriptions or titles.
Welch relates that she ran an Internet search using the keyword "Disney" recently and came up with "erotic Disney cartoons," among other offerings. She typed in "dollhouses," and for no apparent reason, four of the first ten listings were hard-core pornography sites. "They're very obviously seeking children when they do this," says Welch, pointing a finger at the porn industry. She dug up similar smut after typing "toys" and "Aladdin" into search engines. Even the word firemen brought up unsuitable sites for children.
Among other danger zones are live Internet "chat rooms," or discussion groups where sexual predators, the consumers of hard-core and child pornography, are known to lurk. That's where Tracey O'Connell-Jay’s sister, unbeknownst to her family, spent hours on end in virtual conversation with a 24-year-old divorcé, who at first claimed to be her age. "Nobody knew, because nobody was computer literate," she recalls of her family back East. "They wouldn't have known how to turn on the thing." The uncle next door had bought the computer for his own children, but didn't know how to use it. The online chats led to phone calls, which led to a rendezvous at a shopping mall six days before Christmas, and then her sister's disappearance.
Though police caught up with them four months later, O'Connell-Jay says the family has been unable to reconnect emotionally with her sister, now a junior in high school. They dread what might happen after the predator walks out of a military prison at the end of 2000, after serving three and a half years for crimes including the military equivalent of statutory rape.
O'Connell-Jay now educates parents, teachers and police on the subject of Internet safety, while holding down a day job. Basically, she recommends that parents get involved in their children's Internet life, and to ask their kids for lessons, if they're computer illiterate.
First and foremost, she protects her son. She has set up a desktop computer 10 feet away from the telephone in her kitchen. O'Connell-Jay says: "I keep an eye on things. He thinks, sometimes, a little too closely. But he understands why. He has seen the devastation that can come from online activity" •
William Bole is a frequent contributor to Catholic magazines. Enough is Enough
Enough is Enough, a nonprofit organization that fights sexual exploitation and illegal pornography, urges parents to become computer literate and Internet savvy. Here are some of the recommendations: Keep the computer in a "public" area of your house. Talk with your children, about their online activities and friends. Install "filtering" software devices, or use a "clean" Internet provider that blocks access to pornographic sites. (It's not 100 percent effective.)
Tell your children to never give out personal information, such as name, address or school.
The organization's Web site is located at www.enough.org.
