mtl3p

Have you seen those posters around Montreal depicting the little boy and girl with their “bobo’s”? It is by the Marie-Vincent Foundation, whose mission is to “de prÈvenir les situations d’abus et de nÈgligence chez les enfants de moins de douze ans.” It is a pretty controversial ad for it’s brutality, how blatant it is, and the difference between the bobo’s of the little girl and the little boy (the little girl has a bloody mark between her legs and the boy has a black eye). I think they did a great job. I volunteered for three years at Outreach (the public education branch of the McGill Sexual Assault Center), I think its an extremely important issue and I just emailed them to congratulate them on the campaign.

I finally went to their site because of an article I just read about the trial of the killer of Holly Jones, a 10 year old from Toronto. The man who killed her (he already pled guilty) was Michael Joseph Briere, an frequent consumer of online child pornography.

There were a bunch of articles written about the issue of child porn / censorship of the internet in the Globe and Mail since then.

On one side: “A journey into depraved cyberspace. It took JAN WONG only 70 minutes to find a spate of child-porn sites.”
“In Canada, Internet service providers say they don’t monitor content and leave that role to police, taking action when presented with a court order. Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie of the Toronto police’s sex crimes squad said he has grown frustrated with Canadian ISPs. “I don’t know why our service providers don’t understand that they are facilitating access to these websites,” he said. “They can block them, and they don’t seem to have the will.”"

and Get tougher on child-porn users and Internet providers, critics say:
“Companies such as Internet Service Providers that allow the free flow of child porn and protect the privacy of those who view it (forcing police to use search warrants to obtain the real names of users), software manufacturers that make “encryption packages,” and makers of “thumb drives,” which enable users to download images onto a gadget that resembles a key chain, should be held accountable, Mr. Butt said. “A lot of companies have to recognize their role in facilitating access to this stuff.”

and on the other side: “Men who savage childhood.”
“But the truth is, child porn didn’t make Michael Briere do it, and it didn’t make him who he is. He’d wanted a child for sex “probably forever,” after all; he surfed the web in search of pictures because he was a pedophile already, not the other way around. This is no chicken-and-egg question. What the web and its breathtaking proliferation of kiddie-porn sites and easy-as-pie access more likely did was to assure him he was not so very weird, and certainly not alone. And he isn’t.”

I think about issues of censorship a lot and also about the values that are built into technologies (open / closed, what users they are created for, the values of the “inventors”, etc). I think that technologists have some moral responsability for what they create. And one of the intended results of ISF is enabling/promoting anonymous internet access. It makes me shiver when I think of these uses for our networks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004 at 4:57 am and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.