Stop Blaming the Internet

Stop Blaming the Internet

There is an increasing amount of blame being placed on the Internet as the source of corruption in teenagers and children. One source of fear comes from news articles concerning youth that are making explosives from the easily found instructions on the web. There has been a flood of reaction to children finding recipes for explosives on the Internet. However, in blaming the Internet parents are ignoring the fact that children were making explosives long before the web existed.

The source of some children's knowledge of making pipe bombs is actually from a book. _The Anarchist's Cookbook_, published in 1971, was, and still is, the source for these bomb recipes and other recipes for mischievous behavior long before the Internet searches provided the answers. Actually, many of the sites I found that give bomb-making recipes, cite this book as the source. One site actually gives the whole book in a zip file, which can be downloaded on to your PC.

So parents might ask, how did children get access to this book, before the web? Despite what parents think, children will go through much trouble to get the information they are interested in. If children wanted to learn how to make a pipe bomb, they mail-ordered the book to get the answers just as easily as they would search for the subject on the web. Facility in getting information does not necessarily preclude using information that one normally would not use. Julia Wilkins in her article, "Protecting Our Children from Internet Smut: Moral Duty or Moral Panic?" quotes Lisa Schmeiser, a researcher of on-line pornography-who testifies to children's ingenuity. Schmeiser says, "There will be children who circumvent passwords, Surfwatch software, and seemingly innocuous links to find the 'adult' material. But these are the same kids who would visit every convenience store in a five mile radius to find the one stocking of Playboy" (1). In other words, Internet access is not the only source for "indecent" material; children will always find a way to see what they are not supposed to see.

Mainly, the burden being placed on the Internet is a displacement of the blame that should be put on the parents themselves. The cause for deviant behavior in children often is not the result of media, but lack of parental guidance and support. As Wilkins suggests, "the easiest solution [to blocking access to 'indecent material' on the Internet] is to keep the family computer in a well-traveled space, like a living room, so that parents can monitor what their children download" (2). One friend of mine, who prefers to stay anonymous, built a pipe bomb as an adolescent, before the Internet existed, and admitted in retrospect that he did it because he could; with both parents working and him home alone, he was able to do what he wanted.

Most importantly, by focusing on the "evils of the Internet," politicians and legislators, parents and the media are all straying away from the more pressing issues. The main issue is violence and deviance among adults themselves-not the electronic "brainwashing" media. Mike Males writes about this issue in his article entitled, "Stop Blaming Kids and TV." As he says, "All sides seem to agree that fictional violence, sex on the screen, Joe Camel, beer-drinking frogs, or naked bodies on the Internet pose a bigger threat to children than do actual beatings, rape or parental addictions" (3). Males gives incredible statistics which prove that deviance among adults towards children greater than deviance attributed to the electronic media. He says how the Institute for Alternative Media emphasizes, 'the average American child will witness 200,000 acts of [TV] violence' by the time that child graduates from high school"(4). He goes on to say that, "None of these varied interests note that during the eighteen years between a child's birth and graduation from high school, there will be fifteen million cases of real violence in American homes grave enough to require hospital emergency treatment"