[Editorial] Child Protection’s First Year

President Lee Myung-bak and ruling Grand National Party Chairman Kang Jae-sup declared this year as the first year for the protection of children, pledging to keep children from falling victim to abduction and sexual assault, during a regular meeting on Friday. First Lady Kim Yoon-ok participated in a declaration ceremony for the campaign promoting child protection and emphasized the urgent need to root out violence against children, which she described as is an heinous crime. But question is whether practical and effective measures can be taken to safeguard children and whether those measures can be implemented on a national scale with active participation from the public. Whether or not we are able to protect children from a deluge of obscene materials on the Internet is one example.

According to a survey of teenagers conducted by the now-defunct National Youth Commission, a majority of respondents said they began watching explicit media when they were fourth to sixth graders in elementary school and first-year middle schoolers. Elementary school students in Daegu, who were involved in group sexual assaults, are also reported to have committed these horrible crimes by emulating what they saw from pornography on the Internet. Pornography is highly addictive. Once indulging in it, people find it hard to pull themselves out of it and make sound ethical judgments, unable to distinguish between the real and the fantasy.

A half of those aged three to five and a whopping 98 percent of elementary school students now use the Internet. Internet-savvy kids know how to get around adult authorization process at adult-only Web sites. Besides lewd Internet sites, there are plenty of ways for children to access indecent material. Those include file transfers among Internet users and downloading and uploading user created contents. Even operators of sound Internet pages are unable to prohibit those peddling salacious material from posting ads on their Web bulletin board. With just a click, children can be exposed to a sea of pornography. We cannot but call into question the performance of the cyber police.

Cable TV broadcasters air explicit sex scenes without screening. These suggestive scenes are enough to provoke the curiosity of children. The government should step up censorship against Internet content and cable TV programs, and enhance education on Internet ethics. What’s regrettable at this critical juncture is that the Broadcasting and Communications Commission, one of which their main duties is to promote public awareness about ethics regarding information and communications, continues to fail to fulfill its duty. It is no exaggeration to say that things have gotten out of control when it comes to Internet pornography.

The government alone cannot successfully protect children from online threats. Parents should also do their share by moving computers to the living room or by installing software that blocks obscene material on their children’s computers.

The government must also come up with broader and more sophisticated plans and implement them rigorously and continuously if it really wants to kick off the first year of child protection.