By SCOTT DEWING
Published: April 2007

I REMEMBER CLEARLY the first time I saw a picture of a naked woman. I was in the basement of my friend Mark’s house where there was an old steamer trunk and in the steamer trunk was a pile of blankets and beneath the blankets—way down at the bottom—was a short stack of Playboy magazines. Mark had discovered them one rainy day when his parents had left him alone in the basement to play. Now he was eager to share his secret treasure trove. We were 10 years old and leafed through each magazine, closely studying the features of these fleshy aliens who, exposed and glistening, looked very unlike the frumpy and conservatively dressed school teachers and mothers who ran our lives.

Today, parents raising children in the Internet Age have some unique challenges. For example, pictures of naked women are no longer hidden in a father’s steamer trunk in the basement. They’re readily accessible on the Internet where online pornography is big business, so big that pornographic websites account for 12 percent of all the websites on the World Wide Web. That’s more than 4 million pornographic websites that annually receive 72 million visitors and generate $2.5 billion in revenue. In the U.S. alone, 40 million people will surf pornographic websites sometime this year. With a total of 200 million Internet users in the U.S. that means that 1 out of every 5 users will access online pornography sometime this year.

And if people aren’t viewing pornography, they’re searching for it. More than 25 percent of all search engine requests are pornography related. That’s 68 million per day. According to the uncensored version of the Wordtracker Report, which lists the top keyword searches on the Internet, the current top three keyword searches are all related to pornography. No. 3 is “sex.” No. 2 is “porn.” And the #1 keyword search is—well, let’s just say that it rhymes with “wussy”, which is what you might call me for not saying the actual word.

Unfortunately, children are among the millions of Internet users who will visit—either intentionally or unintentionally—a pornographic website this year. According to a recent study published in the Journal of Pediatrics, 42 percent of young people aged 10-17 have seen sexually explicit material online. The average age of exposure to Internet pornography is 11. And despite the passing of federal legislation such as the Child Online Protection Act (or, COPA as it is commonly referred to), pornography is more available to minors today than when COPA was passed in 1998.

This was brought home to me one day when my daughter, age 9, asked me, “Dad, why is there a naked woman on the computer?” She had been searching for a book, I don’t recall what, but the search result had returned a website that certainly had nothing to do with children’s literature. Incidents like this happen because unscrupulous adult website operators seek to trick search engines into indexing their site as “relevant” for a particular keyword in order to drive traffic and increase advertising revenue. They also go after common misspellings of words. I had naively thought that my daughter only spent her time online playing games at tomogatchitown and sproutletsgrow.com. I was wrong. She was using Google to search topics of interest to her. And I should have already known this—I was the one who had shown her how to use Google in the first place. It was time to install some filtering software and talk to her about the Internet’s ugly side.

Internet filtering software filters out content by categories and keywords. For example, “Pornography” is a category common to all Internet filtering software packages. Basically, this is a database of known pornographic websites that gets continuously updated as new porn sites pop up every 24 hours on the World Wide Web. If the site you’re going to—either intentionally or unintentionally—is on the list, it’s blocked. Keyword filtering is a bit trickier. It blocks sites based on an algorithm that analyzes the text of a site. For example, if the word “sex” is found a dozen times, the site will be blocked.

While Internet filtering software can be useful for protecting young children from inadvertently ending up at pornographic websites, it can also protect hormonally-driven teenagers—most notably boys—from themselves. “Well, boys will be boys,” you might say. Well, that may be so, but the Internet is not your father’s steamer trunk and your computer might get hosed during their journey into the Internet’s red-light district. I’d seen this before. Some time ago, my neighbor knocked at my door. “Scott, there’s something very wrong with my computer.” This is what happens on a Saturday morning when your neighbors know that you’re home and that you know something about computers.

My neighbor’s computer had become a pornucopia of naked women popping up on screen every 30 seconds. He had likely been the victim of a “drive-by download.” This is when an unscrupulous website exploits operating system and web-browser security holes in order to install software on your computer. It’s important to remember that while your computer is connected to a website, that website is also connected to your computer.

I cleaned up my neighbor’s computer and gave him the bad news. The system infiltration occurred sometime between 12:30 and 1:30 a.m. I listed the various pornographic websites that had been visited. I told him that it was highly likely that one of those sites was the one that had hijacked his computer system. A menacing look came over his face. He explained to me that his teenage son had had a sleep-over that night and all the boys had been closed in the room with the computer. We both knew what had happened.

“Well,” I said.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said.

I suppose that’s one type of parenting plan. Another would be to install Internet filtering software on your home computer and talk to your kids.