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How are we supposed to protect our children when we have no idea what’s out there?

If you accidentally view child pornography you can go to jail; click the wrong link and you get locked up even if you weren’t looking for child pornography you saw it therefore you broke the law.  Is this really fair?  I don’t think so.  Any law or restriction on our first amendment right should require a lot of research in order to ensure that the law is fair. (Although very small minorities of people believe that child pornography should be allowed, we don’t have any idea how prevalent it is, or where most of it is located on the Web)  However, there is no way that anyone can study child pornography on the Internet without potentially going to jail.  Lecture 30, discussed that dangers of even accidentally viewing child pornography, lecture 31 went even further and warned us not to look for websites regarding teen modeling, because these are the newest child pornography sites.  What if you were looking for a teen modeling agency and came across child pornography?  To jail you go, simply by choosing the wrong link.  In a society that is trying to protect children by eliminating child pornography we aren’t doing a very good job to ensure that the proper research is done regarding it, in order to truly protect our children.

Maybe one of the reasons that child pornography is so prevalent, if it is, is because of the fact that most parents don’t know how to protect their children from it.  No parent that is even semi-aware of the child pornography laws would dare search for anything containing the words “child pornography” because of the fear of being arrested.  This fact prevents parents from truly learning where child pornography is on the Internet, in order to keep it away from their children.  Not to mention, if it can’t be studied then how can the parental filters possibly keep child pornography off of their computers?

I think that laws regarding child pornography are essential in order to protect our children.  However, I believe that both law officials and other professionals in this area should work together to study child pornography and where it’s located and exactly how widespread it is.  This will allow the laws regarding child pornography to be straightforward and actually allow them to do what they’re set out to do—protect children from both viewing child pornography and being involved in it.