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CNN Saturday Morning News
Interview With Donna Rice Hughes, Marc Klaas
Aired March 23, 2002 - 09:49 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: This week the U.S. and 10 other countries began taking action to break up an Internet child pornography ring. Authorities seized computers and made numerous arrests.
But how can parents protect their kids from Internet porn?
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. Excuse while I turned away, I was just -- we've got a ton...
PHILLIPS: It's the e-mail.
O'BRIEN: ... a ton of e-mails out there, lot of interest in this. Donna Rice Hughes, child online protection commissioner, and author of "Kids On Line," a good book, "Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace," the subtitle, is with us out of Washington. And on the line from California, Marc Klaas, the father of Polly Klaas, who was killed after being kidnapped from her bedroom in 1993. And he has been crusading on behalf of protecting children ever since.
Good to have you both with us.
DONNA RICE HUGHES, ONLINE PROTECTION COMMISSIONER: Thank you.
MARC KLAAS, FATHER OF POLLY KLAAS: Thank you.
O'BRIEN: All right. Let's get right to the e-mails...
PHILLIPS: Definitely...
O'BRIEN: ... because we have so many.
PHILLIPS: ... we got a lot of them.
O'BRIEN: This is from W.C., just the initials, and this is a good place to start, because we're starting really at the basics here. "Define pornography. Can that apply on the Internet? And how can you tell adults how to prevent seeing this, much less how to prevent our children from being exposed to this?" Big question. We have some more specifics as we go through, but let's just get started with it.
Donna, ladies first.
HUGHES: OK. Well, pornography, there are three different types of pornography legally defined by the law. One is child pornography that depicts a real child being sexually exploited. That is always illegal to possess, distribute, or to produce.
There is also what we call obscenity, that is hardcore pornography that is also illegal, even for adults, and that includes graphic sexual acts and also the deviant forms of pornography like bestiality, torture, rape.
Then there is a category that most of us are familiar with, and that is called harmful to minors material. That's soft-core pornography that is legal for adults to get, for instance, in print and broadcast, like "Playboy," "Penthouse," et cetera. However, it's been segregated away from children in print and broadcast.
Now, Congress has tried to get those same extensions to protect kids from soft-core porn on the Internet, and that's before the Supreme Court right now. So that's the legal definition.
Now, a lot of adults as well as children are coming across pornography accidentally on the Internet. This is just unprecedented now, because before, the Internet, if you wanted to get porn, you had to go buy it, you had to go purchase it, you had to go rent it, et cetera, et cetera.
Now even if you're not looking for it, we know that 89 of kids accidentally came across pornography just in the past year, not looking for it. And the same thing happens with adults, because the pornographers online are very intrusive, and they're trying to get as much eyeballs to their sites as possible.
So the only way to prevent any of this at the end-user level is to use software tools, filtering technologies, as well as safety rules because of all the accidental access.
PHILLIPS: Marc, we got a phone call for you, Sean's on the line from Baltimore. Go ahead, Shane (ph).
CALLER: Do you think that the judges are handing down appropriate sentences for individuals who have child pornography or are caught with child pornography, collecting it, trading it, on the Internet?
KLAAS: I don't think that appropriate sentences are being handed down for any kind of sexual exploitation of children, whether it be online or offline. I think what we're seeing is, we're seeing on the one hand online, we're seeing these efforts to restrict people from accessing information on who the offenders are.
So you have this wonderful tool that we -- that's all about trading information, but you have things like Megan's Law, which is a wonderful online resource that's being totally undermined by certain groups and individuals who oftentimes seem to be the same groups and individuals who are protecting the pornographers' right to put the information online, and then once they get into court, making all of the constitutional, convoluted constitutional arguments to keep them out of prison. PHILLIPS: Right.
O'BRIEN: All right. Let's go back to the e-mail file, shall we? This is a good one, this gets into the subtleties of parenting, if you will. Kristina in New York has this. "The only way to completely protect your kids is to watch them every time they go online. But unfortunately, that's invading their privacy, and they will rebel against it."
Donna, you have any words to the wise? Because, after all, we want to trust our children, don't we?
HUGHES: Well, we do want to trust our children, but this really isn't about trusting our children. This is about an epidemic problem on the Internet. And you can teach your children the kinds of content that is OK for them to look at, and the other kinds of content that is not OK. You can teach them not to talk to strangers. And you need to have all those rules in place.
However, you have to understand the way the sexual predator works online. Typically, about 80, 89 percent of the solicitations of minors sexually on the Internet occurs in chat rooms and instant messaging. And many times these predators will disguise themself so the kid doesn't even actually understand or know that they're talking to an adult, much less a predator.
Secondly, the pornographers again are tricking people into getting to their sites. I mean, a common word search on "boys" or "girls" can take a child to a very hardcore site. "Dogs," even "water sports," there's urination pornography, all these kinds of things, they trick. So no matter what you tell your child, the pornographers have found ways to maneuver and to get pornography in front of unsuspecting children.
That's why filtering tools are so important. And if you just simply talk to your children about using filtering, and I don't think any kid should be online without any kind of filtering in place, because again, they will accidentally stumble across this, and you can't erase if from their minds. Just say, Look, we're going to try to prevent this material from coming into our home so that you can enjoy being online without the intrusion of having to see this stuff.
PHILLIPS: And Marc, you know firsthand, it's -- there are more predators using the Internet now to lure and stalk children versus hiding out in the alleys. But -- and you have been finding out of all different tactics from prisons to mailing lists, so you -- all types of different. Let's talk a little bit about that and how you've gotten involved with things outside of that.
KLAAS: Well, sure, because this is something that goes -- that you and I go back a long way on, Kyra, is this whole business about accessing lists. And the whole deal with predators and children is about access, and it's about anonymity. And certainly the Internet gives you great access and total anonymity.
And certainly one of the things I think is that parents should be looking at is, putting the computer in a common place in the home so that they can start monitoring their children's activity a little more.
I know it's very difficult, but like Donna says, it's just absolutely insidious, and there's very little that can be done outside of the -- outside of totally monitoring them, checking their activity, which you can do, certainly making sure that you can have eyeball contact with whatever they're doing online, and then -- and then -- and then certainly getting onto organizations like the American Library Association that is apparently adamantly against putting filtering software, even on computers that are only accessible through the children's section of the library.
I mean, one has to wonder, you know, who's in charge and what the agenda is here sometimes.
O'BRIEN: All right. Well, we can talk about that subject in just a moment, because the example they always bring up is if a child were to do a research, you know, paper, a term paper of some kind on, say, breast cancer, that would -- it would be filtered away from perfectly legitimate sites on it.
Anyway, we'll ask that question after we take a break. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
O'BRIEN: All right, we're back, we're just about out of time.
Donna, quickly, that, you know, the -- the apocryphal story of the student trying to do the breast cancer term paper, can't do it with the filters. What, how do you answer that one?
HUGHES: Well, first of all, it's not true. These are excuses that have been used by groups like the ACLU to say that filters don't work. Those are -- that's the old generation of filter, 7-, 8-year- old filters. Now the filters are very, very sophisticated. They do distinguish between breast cancer sites and "Playboy" centerfold sites, between water sports, scuba diving, and between urination pornography sites. They're very, very sophisticated.
And also filters allow parents or anybody at the end user, the school, the library, to determine what kinds of content should be filtered. So you can filter pornography and gambling sites but let in sex education sites...
O'BRIEN: All right, Donna...
HUGHES: ... different categories of sites.
O'BRIEN: All right, quickly, just quickly, because we're out of time, lot of people question the porn spam that has been up there, George W. Page (ph) among them. Do these filters work for that, in a nutshell?
HUGHES: Yes, they do. O'BRIEN: OK, great. Donna Rice Hughes...
HUGHES: They absolutely do.
O'BRIEN: ... Marc Klaas, we're sorry we don't have a little more time...
PHILLIPS: Yes, we pushed it to the edge.
O'BRIEN: ... because there's a lot of interest in this. But we -- trying to do it live, this was the producer's challenge show, definitely. Thank you both for being with us on a very important subject.
PHILLIPS: All right.
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