After CDA and COPA were struck down as unconstitutional, Congress tried yet again to restrict minors’ online engagement via law and technical restrictions. In 2000, Congress passed the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). After many challenges in court, CIPA was upheld as constitutional by the US Supreme Court in 2003. It is still in effect at the time of writing. Unlike CDA and COPA (which attempted to directly regulate access to inappropriate material), CIPA relied on existing economic regulations and government-funded institutions as a way to indirectly regulate content. Under the universal service doctrine of the 1934 Telecommunications Act (revised in 1996), many schools and libraries receive federal subsidies for telecommunication services (e.g., telephones, computer equipment, and Internet service); these services are colloquially referred to as E-rate discounts or E-rate schools.
Unlike earlier attempts at regulation, CIPA did not criminalize indecent material writ large, nor did it require schools or libraries to block access to inappropriate content; instead it required recipients of E-rate funding to utilize technical filters to block access to inappropriate material on all computers accessible to minors. Specifically, CIPA required all K–12 public schools and public libraries that receive E-rate funding to enable technology that blocks access to obscenity, child pornography, or content harmful to minors. CIPA also required E-rate recipients to adopt and enforce a policy to monitor and surveil the online activities of minors (FCC Guide to CIPA, 2000). Blocking access to obscenity and child pornography is rather straightforward and mostly uncontroversial, as obscenity is not granted First Amendment protections and child pornography is illegal. “Content harmful to minors,” on the other hand, is a much broader, more subjective, and more controversial stipulation that opens up a multitude of interpretations as to what constitutes harm. As has already been noted, risk and harm are often conflated within discourses of risk, and CIPA’s language allowed for the censorship of all content that presented even the threat of harm.
The E-rate program is an example of how governments indirectly regulate practices. With CIPA, the constraint of the market is used to indirectly fulfill legal objectives that had otherwise been ruled unconstitutional. As a similar example, Lessig (2006) recounts how the Reagan administration required doctors in federally funded clinics to advise patients against abortion as an appropriate method of family planning. This was not necessarily the medical opinion of the doctor, but rather government regulation intended to indirectly reduce abortion rates. Through indirect regulation, the government “gets the benefit of what would clearly be illegal and controversial regulation without even having to admit any regulations exist” (ibid., p. 135). Lessig asserts that indirect regulation is not necessary problematic, but he argues transparency of regulation is of the utmost importance in a democratic society. Similarly, by making technical filters a requirement for E-rate funding recipients, CIPA did not directly regulate access to indecent content online; rather, it relied on pre-existing market constraints. Many of the more than 100,000 schools and libraries that serve low-income populations have little choice but to accept E-rate funding, and therefore they must also comply with the restrictions of CIPA (Patton 2014; Long-term strategic vision … 2009). The very population CIPA was intended to protect—adolescents—is the one disadvantaged by restrictive policies that block access and opportunities for learning. Harm-driven expectations continue to dominate our perceptions of risk, and thus outweigh the potential benefits of a less restrictively filtered Internet. As is further discussed in the next chapter, the unintentional and trickledown effects of CIPA exacerbate rather than alleviate risks when enacted in high schools serving low-income and marginalized populations.
It is important to note that often it is adult institutions that benefit from a moral-panic discourse of youth at risk. The risk discourse positions young people as the scapegoats for broader social, economic, and political problems. Insisting upon boundaries between adulthood and adolescence “enables adults and their institutions to blame youth for a variety of problems created by those very same adults and adult institutions” (Mazzarella 2003, p. 238). I argue that constructing the minor at risk within the cyberporn discourse subjects them to surveillance and regulation and presents the “at-risk” adolescent as the social problem, when in fact the actual problem is morally conservative America’s desire to contain the “deviant” desires of adults who access porn online. Moral-panic discourses divert attention away from (socially constructed) deviant adult behaviors—behaviors that are difficult to control—and instead exert control over the boundaries of childhood. Cloaked as policies purely intended to protect young people from pornography, CDA and COPA infringed upon adults’ right to freedom of speech and can be interpreted as attempts to regulate the sexual morality of American citizens. This echoes Stuart Hall’s (1978) assertion that moral panics serve as vehicles for disseminating dominant ideology—in this case America’s continual struggle over sexual morality as represented through debates about pornography.
The Predator Panic
Concerns about porn have not been completely quelled, but around 2005 risk anxieties were displaced by louder concerns regarding online predators—largely as a result of evolving technologies and changes in how young people engaged with the Internet around that time. The introduction and adoption of social network sites such as MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004 precipitated a shift in how young people engaged and communicated online. The popularity of social network sites allowed teens to create profiles to stay in touch with friends, form communities, and virtually “hang out” online in ways strikingly similar to the ways teens hang out in physical spaces such as malls and parks (boyd 2007; Livingstone 2008). As social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace became increasingly popular, so too did concerns about young people’s interactions with strangers. The “stranger danger” fears have a much longer history in the public imagination. First incited via public-service media campaigns in the 1970s and the 1980s, they continued to gain public attention as cyber chat rooms gained popularity in the mid 1990s; they have only intensified as teens make themselves more visible and accessible via online social network sites. As in the porn panic, misleading statistics linking social network sites to unwanted sexual solicitation proliferated fears about online child predation.
Quantitative data demonstrate that, although online social network sites pose some risks, the risk of sexual solicitation is extremely low (Finkelhor 2013; Hinduja and Patchin 2008; Rosen 2006). Nonetheless, fears about “stranger danger” are on the rise (Keohane 2010; Skenazy 2009), but research tells us that there has never been a safer time to be a child in America (Ingraham 2015). News reports and crime dramas often espouse the risk of child abduction and harm at the hands of a stranger, yet the most likely place for a child to exploited, molested, and assaulted is in the home and by someone the child knows, not by a stranger (Finkelhor 2011, 2013). According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of missing-person reports for children has fallen more than 40 percent since 1997 (Cooper and Smith 2011). Both state and national trends consistently report a decline in the number of crimes committed against children (Finkelhor 2013). David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, points out that only 0.01 percent of all missing children in the US are taken by strangers or slight acquaintances; that means the overwhelming majority of child predators are friends of the child or family (ibid.). Lenore Skenazy (2009), in her book Free-Range Kids, points out the irony of driving children to school or the bus stop to be safe rather than allowing them to walk: children are 40 times more likely to be killed in a car accident than to be abducted on the streets. Nevertheless, fears about strangers far outweigh fears about riding in a car (which is constructed as a quotidian experience). Skenazy also purports that statistically it would take 750,000 years to guarantee that a child left alone in public would be abducted by a stranger (Friedersdorf 2014). The point of these statistics is that there is an inherent risk in everything
a child does, including riding in a car, walking alone in public, and creating a profile on a social network site. But there is also the risk that a child may be harmed by falling down stairs (a leading cause of death; see Iyamba 2012) or by choking on his or her lunch (another leading cause of death; see Nationwide Children’s Hospital, 2010) or may die as a result of a freak heater malfunction (Blackburn 2016), but we understandably do not discourage or outlaw young people from using stairs, eating, or staying warm. Statistics are a way to identify and quantify harm and can also be used to incite fear.
There is little evidence to support “stranger danger” rhetoric, yet it has worked to effectively construct the home as the locus of control and safety for young people and contributed to a construction of the (online) public as a dangerous place. Media have played a pivotal role in shaping these perspectives. Benjamin Radford (2006) goes so far as to blame the online predator panic directly on media sensationalism. In particular he notes that the popular NBC Dateline series To Catch a Predator11 played a significant role in fueling a panic. He accuses the show of being misleading because it incorporated completely inaccurate or even made-up facts. The show used adults as decoys pretending to be underage children. After conversing online in increasingly sexually explicit and graphic ways, the predator would agree to meet the “child.” When he arrived, the host, Chris Hansen, would ask the predator “to take a seat”; he would then reveal that the conversations had been staged. The show concluded with the predators’ guilty, shocked, and shamed reactions to getting caught. To Catch a Predator made it seem as though lewd men were lurking around every virtual corner just waiting to victimize a child at any moment. The perverseness of their online conversations were often highlighted, which included unnecessary graphic and sensationalized details of sexual acts.
To Catch a Predator is important to consider because, by definition, moral panics must be publicly accessible (Marwick 2008). Additionally, according to Cohen (1972), moral panics rely on “ready-made stock images” (p. 57) and serve as “dominant vehicles for diffusion” (p. 63). The series relied on the conception of the stereotypically innocent and naive child and the inherently vile and perverse predator—it went to great length to include the perverse and graphic ways predators conversed with their potential targets, which understandably contributed to and incited fear in parents. The media scholar Alice Marwick (2008) chronicles the 2006 cyberpredator panic, what she refers to as a technopanic; the panic was concerned about sexual predators on the most popular social network site at the time, MySpace. She asserts that technopanics have three defining characteristics: “First, they focus on new media forms, which currently take the form of computer–mediated technologies. Second, technopanics generally pathologize young people’s use of this [sic] media, like hacking, file-sharing, or playing violent video games. Third, this cultural anxiety manifests itself in an attempt to modify or regulate young people’s behavior, either by controlling young people or the creators or producers of media products.” Similar to the porn panic, popular discourse constructed MySpace (and teen-populated social network sites and chat rooms writ large) as a space for pedophiles to prey upon children who were discursively constructed as innocent, vulnerable, and lacking maturity or agency to protect themselves.
Child predation is a legitimate concern and one that we as a society ought to actively take steps to minimize and prevent. However, the predator panic of the mid 2000s falsely blamed technology for increasing the risk of predation when no such data existed to support the claim. In fact, Finkelhor (2013) points out that the decline in crimes against children can actually be partially attributed to an increase in available technology.12 This is in stark contrast to rhetoric that blames technology for the imagined increase in crimes committed by strangers. The focus on strangers as suspect reflects a privileged understanding of risk and sexual harm. Middle-class parents are increasingly restricting the public spaces they allow their unaccompanied children to occupy (boyd 2014; Livingstone 2008; Skenazy 2009), which in itself is a privileged choice. Working-class and poor children often do not have the same options for supervision as children from middle-class homes. Because of financial instability and precarious living situations, working-class children are more likely to spend time alone after school, to care for younger siblings, to be in the care of someone other than a parent, to rely on access to public transportation, bikes, and walking as a means of getting home from school or to and from work, and so forth. Thus, while all children are at risk of sexual predation from family members and acquaintances, working-class children are more likely to spend time unaccompanied in public (Dodson et al. 2012; Lareau 2003).
The Internet has become the new public and has given rise to growing middle-class concerns about child predators. At the beginning of the predator panic, middle-class youth were more likely to be using social network sites—or at least have reliable and frequent access to the sites—than were working-class and poor youth (Lenhart, Madden, and Hitlin 2005). This distinction reflects the classed nature of what garners public attention and what gets constructed as risky. More than ten years later, teens’ participation on social network sites has become commonplace, yet fears about online sexual predators are still frequent and visible. While working on this book one afternoon, I happened to read a story on the website of WFAA, the local Dallas ABC affiliate, about predators’ using games to lure children. In the story (Eiserer 2015), a 10-year-old white girl was sent an inappropriate message while playing a game on her phone. “It was frighteningly simple,” the opening line read, “for 10-year-old Olivia to accidentally connect with a child sex predator through a game.” In response to the incident, the girl’s mother replied: “We don’t let our kids walk anywhere. We don’t let them go out by themselves. If they’re outside riding bikes, somebody’s out there with them. That’s who we are. We know bad things can happen.” Such rhetoric is consistent with middle-class fears of the public and reflect the options middle-class parents have in supervising their children—options not always available to working-class families. Hence the privileged way the problem is framed. The mother’s comment “That’s who we are” points out how she believes she is doing “everything right,” she is not a “bad” parent, and her child does not fit the description of a child at risk. Yet even within this middle-class home children are at risk. Markedly, Olivia immediately told her parents about the incident, the user was blocked, and no real harm was encountered; nonetheless, the risk itself reasonably incites fear even in the absence of harm.
Online “stranger danger” incidents are significantly rare and stand out as exceptional, yet stories such as these continue to make the news and provide narrative fodder for crime dramas precisely because they are about “good” children with “good” parents. They disrupt our understanding of who is at risk. The story of the abused runaway from a broken home is far less likely to attract media attention compared to an attack on a child we collectively perceive as privileged—and thereby innocent and entitled to protection. Research consistently demonstrates that marginalized youth—youth of color, from poor homes, with unstable family lives, and some others—are not granted the same presumptions of and entitlement to innocence as are white, middle-class youth from “good” homes. Marginalized young people are constructed as “deviant,” and their stories of risk and harm are much less likely to make the news (unless they are in trouble with the law) and remain largely absent from our collective imaginations (Giroux 2009; Hasinoff 2015; HoSang 2006; Rios 2006). Stories of privileged youth, such as the WFAA one (and so many like it), are disproportionately more likely to catch the attention of the media than are the more frequent scenarios of sexual abuse to which runaways, homeless youth, and other marginalized young people are subjected (Fernandes-Alcantara 2013).
My point isn’t that we shouldn’t be concerned about child predation (we should), but that we ought to consider the root of the problem, understand who is at risk, and approach the problem from a less myopic view th
an one that narrows in on the “cyber” or “online” nature of the crimes. What we see, though, are policies that aim to regulate and restrict how young people use social media—platforms that are integral to their ability to communicate with peers, construct identities, seek out information, engage civically, and form supportive communities—rather than controlling adult predators who are the actual problem. In the sections that follow I examine the Deleting Online Predators Act and the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act in order to explore the production and mobilization of predator risk discourse.
The Deleting Online Predators Act
It is important to note that the Children’s Internet Protection Act did not require schools to block access to social network sites, but that many schools have chosen to block students’ access to all social media. The 2006 Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which was passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 410–15 but was not voted on by the Senate, would have required schools receiving E-rate funding to block access to all social network sites and chat rooms. Social network sites were broadly defined as commercial sites that “(i) allow users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users; and (ii) offer a mechanism for communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, email, or instant messenger” (section 3, Deleting Online Predators Act). DOPA contributed to the acceptance of the Internet as a dangerous space in particularly gendered ways by relying on a media discourse that constructed girls as especially vulnerable and at risk of predation. Although the bill was overwhelmingly passed by the House, opponents were worried that it would be overly restrictive and that it would block access to potentially educational or useful websites, such as Amazon, blogs, and wikis, that might fall under the bill’s overly broad definition of social network sites.
Worried About the Wrong Things Page 10