Comment Articles

No smoke without fire?

Tony Westbrook AnchorDesk

Published: 08 Aug 2000 16:02 BST

Remember the way the link between 'Mad Cow' disease and CJD kept being mentioned by worried parties who where then dismissed or even discredited by government officials, using 'research' and science to suggest there was no basis for concern? And of course we all know that it turned out to be all too true.

Computers have their own BSE-style issues bubbling down there. Once is the link between child and teen violence and violent games. The other is the danger of an unrestricted internet beamed into our homes corrupting our kids (and us I suppose...)

For the first we see a seemingly endless tit-for-tat publication of research projects. Each finds or fails to find (delete whichever you are least comfortable with) a casual link between youth violence on screen and out in the real word. The last two I've seen have both supported the link though they have been pooh-poohed by a games industry with a lot of money at stake. For my money, a couple of high school kids playing out a very personal level of Duke Nukem at their school was at powerful argument that these games do innure kinds (and maybe adults too) to the real effects of violence.

And so to the web. Here is no question that there are some vile things available in a huge number of UK homes thanks to the all-powerful reach of the Internet. Suggestions that nasty images or content are 'hard to find' are laughable, as any teenage boy left alone with a PC could attest. And we've probably all had that nasty moment when we mistype a well-known URL as Granny looks on and something pops up on-screen that we'd rather stayed popped down...

Likewise just about any email address will eventually get found by the porn merchants who will then invite you to visit their site either with an explicit description of what you will find, or (more pernicious still) a dangerous link disguised as something quite innocent. I have about six active email addresses and all but one (my CIX email account actually) get loads of this stuff.

So if you do have kids, you end up with four courses of action you can take:

First: You don't let them anywhere near that instrument of the devil, the Internet, or its disciple, the PC.
Second: You sit with them whenever they are online to monitor where they go, and you check their email box first to make sure nothing nasty has arrived there and delete it quick if it does.
Third: You employ some kind of cyber nanny program to control their access to the net and trust to that software to do the job for you.
Fourth: You leave them to it and assume they will grow up a lot faster then you did when the filthiest stuff you could get hold of wouldn't even make it onto an episode of Channel 4's Eurotrash.