Nothing like a little deviant sex scandal to put the thrill back into your AOL chat-room experience. Granted, it was not a guide but an AOL attorney caught with his hands down the short pants of an 11-year-old e-mate, but when it comes to child molestation, safety apparently trumps sorrow. Now that virtual au pairs of AOL's Kids Only areas get criminal background checks, frantic parents are unfreaked a bit, but the pedophilophobia keeps looming and lurking.
If only it were enough to instruct the kinder to refrain from talking with strangers. Sadly, the Internet is all about talking to strangers, and, as the daytime television producers have enjoyed demonstrating, such talk often leads to true love.
But it's another kind of love that has led to suggestions such as Fairfax County Public Library's defeated proposal to allow parents to block their children's library Net access entirely. Not prepared to be cops, or to cop to the hassle of out-hacking the preteen smut curious, they just gave up. But every newfound episode of networked perversion makes it less likely that parents will give up their anxiety any time soon. Barring any technological prophylactic, and taken to its logical extreme, the solution to unacceptable and unpredictable online sexual transgressions is simple and unmarred by the complexities of software filter engineering: Ban children from the Net entirely.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
