"Protect" the Children From Porn

By all means, let's Protect The Children. Because that's what it's all about, right? It doesn't matter whose life gets mowed down in the process, as long as we are clear that it's all in the name of keeping kids innocent.

Except we seem to be confusing innocence with ignorance.

Next Friday, substitute teacher Julie Amero of Norwich, Connecticut, will receive her sentence -- up to 40 years in prison, the press repeats with a mixture of horror and glee -- for exposing children to pornography in the classroom.

It could be worse. Had some charges not been dropped, she could have faced 10 felony charges instead of four.

The prosecution claims she deliberately visited porn sites from the class computer and allowed the 12- and 13-year-olds to view the content. She claims -- and evidence proves -- the school computer got hit with a pop-up frenzy she didn't know how to stop.

Tech-savvy lawyers are pointing out glaring technological and legal errors made by both sides of the case. Computer forensics researchers have been re-creating the incident, using a disk image of the classroom machine, to show how insidious pop-up porn can be. SecurityFocus columnist Mark Rasch published a 6,200-word analysis exposing the basic tech ignorance of just about everyone involved: the police detective who performed the forensic analysis, the state's attorney, the defense attorney, the jury, the school administrators, the school IT department and Julie herself.

Julie is taking the fall, but many other people failed before a porn storm burst into that classroom.

The IT department failed to keep content filters and anti-malware software up-to-date. The school failed to enforce a security policy, allowing substitute teachers to use regular teachers' network credentials to access the internet. The administration failed to ensure that all teachers, including substitutes, had the necessary skills and training to handle internet surprises -- and the savvy to respond quickly in a crisis.

<...the entire system failed to set reasonable standards for what's not important (censorship) and what is (free inquiry)>

And the community fails to Protect The Children in the example it's setting. What should have been a wake-up call for the district employment office -- and for IT -- has spiraled embarrassingly out of control.

Some students mentioned the incident to their parents, and some parents mentioned it to the administration, and the district told the parents that Julie wouldn't be teaching there anymore.

It should have ended there. Instead, a subset of parents threw a tantrum and demanded, in one detective's words, "aggressive police response."

As a result, Julie was arrested for the crime of deliberately exposing children to porn, even though nobody bothered to check the computer for malware first. Apparently, her mistakes in handling the situation could only have meant she deliberately brought porn into the classroom.

What message does this witch hunt send to students? That if you scream and huff and puff, you can get your way -- and a spot on national television -- even when you haven't made the most basic attempts to verify the assumptions on which you base your accusations?

That teachers are at the mercy of parents, even in small numbers? So if you don't like a teacher, you can use a volatile issue like internet porn to set off your parents and get that teacher fired, maybe even jailed?

No reasonable person wants to see pornography in a junior-high classroom. But no reasonable person believes that if a porn storm takes over the school browser, it has to be because the teacher deliberately called it there. At least give the teacher the benefit of the doubt and look for other, non-felonious explanations first.

Accidental porn is actually a very common occurrence, even among savvy web users -- I ran into some myself just the other day. According to the Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 34 percent of youths age 10 to 17 who use the internet have unintentionally encountered pictures of naked people or people having sex. See "Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later" (.pdf). In most cases the encounter is not distressing to the kids; they click away and move on.

Seventh grade is not too early to learn how to handle the internet responsibly.

<and they probably know more about sex than their teacher at that point anyway>

Had Julie been a more confident teacher, she could have turned this incident into an opportunity to talk about smart internet usage. Switch off or cover the monitor, sit on the desk and get the class talking about what just happened. Ask the students how they've handled such surprises in the past.

It's a language arts class -- learning how to have a civil, open discourse about current affairs is certainly on-topic. And then segue back to the lesson plan, without blowing the situation out of proportion.

Although given the ridiculously lynch-mob nature of the case, a class discussion might still have cost Julie her job.

We fail to Protect The Children when we react with fear and hate to the challenges inherent to interactive media, rather than accepting them and figuring out common-sense ways to deal.

We do students a disservice when we provide them with teachers who aren't equipped with the skills to incorporate computers and the internet into education. A teacher who doesn't know how to close a browser gone wild probably should not have internet access in the classroom.

We also seem to react with fear to almost everything that combines new technology and sex or sexual content. But I've been wondering if that's because fear truly is the majority response, or if it's because the most fearful are the ones making the most noise and thus making the headlines.

That IT and security experts all over the world are outraged at the case, and moved enough to work for free to prove the charges are unfounded, reassures me that we haven't all lost our minds just because there's porn on the internet.

Not long ago, we could pretend that teenagers had no access to adult material, and ignore any giggling coming from the boys' bathroom.

Now, the ritual of stealing dad's girlie magazines to share with friends has been replaced by an online barrage of every sexualizable act humans can fit on camera and then some. Where once a magazine -- a static collection of still photographs, generally related to a particular theme -- was passed around in secret like prized bounty, youths can now immerse in a jumbled, chaotic morass of sexual imagery without context or organization.

We can forbid them from looking all we want, but what will they do when confronted with adult material by accident if the adults can't even model a sane reaction?

A K-12 classroom is not an appropriate place for porn. And yet is it an excellent venue for developing critical-thinking skills and learning how to discuss a topic without getting caught up in a mob mentality.

Last year, another teacher lost a job because a handful of blue movies she had made at 22 surfaced on the internet and a student recognized her. Despite protests from parents who supported her and said she was a good example of how people can change their lives, she was suspended and her contract was not renewed because her past made her "too distracting" for the boys.

Never mind that at 16, everything is distracting for boys, and that she probably had the most focused attention of any of the science teachers.

If we truly want to Protect The Children, we will set aside the knee-jerk "OMG it's porn!" crusade and model a more rational approach for young people. We will teach them to think critically about everything they encounter online, not just porn.

And we will applaud on March 2 when Julie's sentence is a slap on the wrist, when her case is dismissed as a mistrial or overturned on appeal.

<All of which begs the question "Is seeing porn harmful to anyone?" to which the answer is "No">