Hotline can't answer Internet's child pornography problem

Child pornography remains the single most emotive issue associated with the Internet. While only the most morally bankrupt and socially odious could support its availability on the Web, the issue has nonetheless been enveloped in sanctimonious hysteria.

Hysteria, because many people seem to think the medium itself - that is, the Internet - is evil, rather than the content sent across it. Because the medium is complex and confusing to many people, they misdirect their fear and blame towards it, rather than towards the people who utilise it in corrupt ways.

The Internet is complex and confusing. People who know how to lurk in its back alleyways, hiding nasty material in digital networks and sometimes encoding it so that it is virtually inaccessible, evoke a special kind of panic and worry. Parents worry that their own children could become victims of such people, who traffic in children's misery with such aplomb. Or they fear their children could stumble across these horrific images themselves, as they journey about the Net. The Net seems to offer child pornographers sanctuary. That makes decent people afraid.

The sanctimoniuosness arises from other people - sometimes crass and patronising, sometimes well-meaning - who take advantage of people's natural fears of an incomprehensible medium that can harbour badness. They know the emotive nature of child pornography, and they know there are legitimate fears about the ease with which such images can be passed around the Internet.

However, those who condemn the Net, and seek restrictive measures against it, also often have a larger agenda. They not only want to suppress child pornographers, but all sorts of other information and imagery that is available on the Internet. They would like to limit what other people see, talk about, and look for. They take an offensive issue, child pornography, and use it to forward other agendas.

Likewise, some people - especially those who want publicity or political kudos - use the child pornography issue as a cheap bid for attention. Mention your noble fight against child pornography - no matter how pointless, no matter what dangerous ramifications it could have in other arenas of free speech, of adult rights, of privacy rights - and score easy points with those who worry about an electronic world over which they seem to have no control.

Unfortunately, the most overblown reactions tend to come from official agencies. To be fair, they are also the targets of the collective anxieties of a public that is often uneasy with the Internet.

But they also often feel pressured to act - to be seen to do something, no matter how empty the gesture, or how unlikely it is to address the real issues at hand, or how worrisome the eventual implications of the gesture might be.

That's why all sorts of questions must hang over the Internet Service Provider's Association of Ireland's new child pornography hotline. It's difficult to know what purpose it's supposed to serve. The obvious answer is that it is there to help fight child pornography. But why would people choose an intermediary in order to report any instances of child porn they discover on the Internet, rather than simply lifting the phone and contacting the Garda?

Once the idea of the hotline was mooted, the ISPs, already concerned about possible censorship on the Net, could not be seen to oppose it. Nor could the Internet and technology industry in general. But how interesting that the hotline idea, introduced ages ago, failed to interest the Department of Justice until the hoo-ha over salacious advertisements in In Dublin. How curious that the creation of a hotline to deal with this so-easily-offensive topic was suddenly, publicly funded and highlighted.

Why not instead engage with the real issues of illegal activity and the Internet, and begin to determine concrete public policy? Why not discuss wider issues of public sensibility, offensive material and censorship, all unresolved matters for 20th - not to mention 21st - century Ireland? Why don't Irish ISPs try to unite and tackle other pressing issues rather than this easy sop to public fear?

And why not educate people about the Net and the realities of stumbling across child pornography? The truth is that very few people are ever likely to use a hotline to report an instance of child porn because they are unlikely to have anything to report. And the people who backed the hotline know that perfectly well.

klillington@irish-times.ie