Recently a local Northern Minnesota paper published an unfocused rant against our culture, attacking free speech, the 'pornography industry' and the media without any evidence or support. The timing was particularly bad for a screed supposedly based on protecting kids entitled "taking the temperature" as child had died in the preceding days due to exposure to the extreme cold in our area. One fact that tragedy brought to light is that parents are often failing to have conversations with their children about very real hazards in the immediate environment like getting locked out in the cold, and strategies to to avoid or survive it.
In her article, Kelly Brevig equates all pornography with violence against women, that pornography normalizes sexual abuse and makes claims that "free speech has been hijacked" by consumers demand for porn. She encourages parents to "speak out" instead of taking any concrete steps to protect children. She encourages parents to feel rage and frustration that there are no filters, and porn is "one click away" instead of encouraging them to take responsibility for how the internet is used in their own homes.
I believe that parents can and should take basic steps like supervising and restricting their child's access to the internet or other media to protect them from becoming involved in harmful activities that can be mediated by the internet and internet-enabled devices like cellphones. Parents should not rely on the internet to to distract and entertain children, instead of hiring reputable babysitters or signing them up for age appropriate organized activities through community education. Many manufacturers and content creators target parents and kids with advertisements for internet entertainments that are not safe for children and harvest personal data from children in ways that are illegal. The Attorney General of California has initiated some litigation against some of these firms, and published a useful guide for parents on "App Safety"
Parents probably do not want to have their internet access shut off because their children are pirating copyrighted music, films or pornography or worse become targets of federal investigations because government agents have seductively lured lonely, mentally ill teenagers into committing illegal acts and getting octopus neck tattoos at the taxpayers expense.
So, obviously the internet is a bad place for children to be left alone. That fact is not excuse to attack the free speech rights of others based on an impulse to suppress the availability of images depicting taboo sex, including consensual rough sex, or to make unsupported claims about the agenda of media corporations and the porn industry.
Obviously most of the material that parents might object to that is only "one click away" is pirated content on tube sites and torrents, and the "pornography industry" is fighting that uncompetitive practice and intellectual property theft. A whole host of laws like 2257 make the established, for profit pornography industry more tightly regulated than most nuclear power plants, but the availability of HD video cameras and applications like Vine made it possible for young people who might legally have sex with themselves and their peers to crate illegal content and face charges that would make them sex offenders for life. Parents need to talk to their teenagers about avoiding the consequences of creating and sharing illegal content and stolen copyrighted content.
Kelly Brevig's piece in the Bemidji Pioneer is an out-of-date regurgitation of Andrea Dworkin's feminist dogma: "an alarmist cocktail of horror and fury, with little interest in finding pragmatic ways to reduce women's abuse". There is no practical advice to concerned parents but to invite her and her group to spout more of the same useless rage.
We have very little leverage over what the mainstream media decides the spring fashion should be, but if it is -40 degrees Fahrenheit we have an obligation to keep our kids indoors and only let them out with appropriate clothing for the day's weather. Kids will see adults do stupid and dangerous things in the cold, like the polar plunge through the ice into the frigid waters of Lake Bemidji, or running between the car and the gym in shorts, but adults have the freedom to make such choices for themselves. Parents have some rights to prevent their children from participating in dangerous or distasteful activities, but it is useless to try to enforce one's own culture, taste and sensibilities on the whole society when doing so is legally impossible because of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.