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Senators Hear Arguments for Internet Safety EducationThe U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held hearings July 24 to review steps that Congress could take to protect children from online predators. The hearings were called to solicit input on a revised version of the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act (S. 49) that Committee Vice Chairman Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said his staff is working on, following the bill’s failure to come up for a vote. One expert witness was David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, who provided the committee with statistics on internet predation:
Finkelhor advised committee members that giving out personal information is “not what puts kids at risk,” nor does having a blog, a personal website, or a MySpace account. “We need to educate them about why hooking up with a 32-year-old has major drawbacks like jail, bad press, and public embarrassment.” He added, “Like discouraging kids from smoking or drinking, the simple scare tactics often don’t work. . . . We shouldn’t allow a sense of crisis to mobilize us into misguided crusades.” Lan W. Neugent, assistant superintendent for technology and human resources at the Virginia Department of Education, also spoke of the need for appropriate education for students. He noted that in 2006 Virginia became the first state to require internet safety in the school curriculum and mentioned library media specialists as “essential to our internet safety program implementation.” Although no witnesses from the civil liberties community were represented at the hearings, the Center for Democracy and Technology submitted a statement that echoed the call for internet safety education as “the most important step that the government can take.” Sen. Stevens did mention that identifying more effective filtering technologies would be a part of his revised legislation, although he qualified it as a way to “better enable parents to proactively protect their children online.” “The American Library Association appreciates the shift in debate to education,” ALA Office of Government Relations Director Lynne Bradley told American Libraries, “rather than expanding the federal mandate to block content, as the Children’s Internet Protection Act already does. The experiences of librarians, parents, teachers, and others continue to affirm that teaching kids how to safely navigate the World Wide Web is the best tool.” Posted July 27, 2007. |
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