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For parents, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Internet is the easy access it gives kids to pornography. Hard-core sexual images, which were once very difficult to acquire, are now just a mouse click away.
It's important, however, to put Internet pornography into context.
Online pornography is part of a larger picture, where 'sexualized' images of young people are increasingly used to sell everything from perfume to clothing. Kids are also exposed to explicit sexual material in the video games they play, the magazines they read and the movies and TV they watch.
Online pornography grabs our attention largely because of the aggressive marketing techniques that adult sites employ. Yet, in spite of all the sexually explicit pop-up windows, e-mail spam and search results, pornographic sites actually make up a very small portion of Internet content. According to the U.S.-based Online Computer Library Center, in 2002, sexually explicit Web sites represented only 3 per cent of all public sites. On the other hand, over half of Canadian kids say they've ended up on an adult site accidentally, usually while:
- doing an online search for something using a search engine
- typing in the wrong Web site address
- clicking on a link in an e-mail, instant message or chat room posting
- using file-sharing software that allows easy access to pornographic images and videos
With more than a half a million adult sites on the Internet, the online pornography industry is highly competitive. Adult marketers are continually developing new strategies to drive traffic to their sites. Some of their tactics are:
- 'Click-throughs': Every time someone clicks through an adult site to another one, the site's advertising revenues go up. To increase the number of click-throughs, some sites use pop-up windows. Known as 'mouse napping,' this technique traps users in an endless loop of porn.
- 'Home page hi-jacking': This involves planting a Java script command on computers to change the user's default home page to a porn site. Changing the home page back to its original setting appears to solve the problem until the computer is rebooted, then the offensive site re-appears as the home page.
- 'Stealth' sites: These are porn sites that steer users their way through a variety of techniques, including buying up expired domain names, exploiting common misspellings, or using well-known names of companies or artists.
- Using hidden key words that are picked up by search engines: Porn operators bury key words, including brand names of popular toys, in the code of their Web sites to attract children.
Trying to control porn in a global medium like the Internet is difficult at best. Most Internet pornography, while offensive and distasteful to many users, is not illegal. As well, countries have different cultural standards and legislation regarding sexual material, and content that is banned in one jurisdiction may be easily accessible on servers in another jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, even if pornography is banned in a country, it can still have a significant presence. For example, Australian legislation bans Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from hosting pornographic material on their servers. Yet a 2002 study showed that 84 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls in Australia have been exposed accidentally to online pornography.
Impact on children and young people
While there is little research on whether viewing pornography harms children, several recent studies have shown that when young children are accidentally exposed to online pornography they find it disturbing.
Teens, particularly adolescent males, have always been driven by natural curiousity to seek out pornography. This hasn't changed. What's different is the easy access the Internet gives kids to deviant or violent sexual content, which may have an influence on their developing attitudes towards sexuality and relationships.
Tips for parents
Regardless of the evidence that exists concerning the effect of pornography on kids, as parents, we know we don't want our children accidentally stumbling across it when they are young, or developing an appetite for it during their teen years. You can help protect your kids by taking an active role in their Internet use.
Sponsoring software- Snitch
Snitch is a drive cleaner tool created to help cleanup hard discs of offensive images, movies, internet history and other illicit files. Snitch can perform a hard drive picture search, identifying files that contain nudity, and then perform tasks such as deleting history, as well as other porn scan operations in the process of cleaning hard drives. Other disk cleaner tools do not offer all the functions of internet history cleaner and general system cleaner , and they therefore cannot clean disks and leave your computer with a completely clean drive.
Snitch uses 'intelligent', adaptive algorithms to search hard drive space and clean your computer of adult games, free adult movies and various other adult entertainment files. Skin color analysis along with other techniques make Snitch the porn scanner that is ideally suited to remove adult content.
Snitch is a software tool that is designed to cleanup disk drives and to cleanup computer storage devices of adult content. Snitch has deletion algorithms capable of deleting files, deleting internet history, deleting adult pornography and leaving you with a clean hard disk. This prevents the necessity of erasing the hard drive completely and reinstalling an operating system. Therefore a clean computer can be achieved without a full re-install. In this way Snitch performs the functions of porn eraser, hard drive cleaner, internet cleaner, and a general PC cleaner. Clean up your hard drives with Snitch software.
Snitch provides a free demo for users to test the software for themselves. This free porn remover demo allows users to try out Snitch before paying, to see if it performs as they expect it to.
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