The technological revolution has produced a new type of assault on decency: the computer can be put to other uses besides the storage and communication of useful information.
Internet, the biggest computer network in the world, linking millions of people, is widely used for the transmission of scientific and academic material. But it also has “alternate news group” which deal with subjects ranging from hobbies to sexual lifestyles. Someone with the right computer connections can post sexual fantasies and smutty stories in the system and accompany them with explicit illustrations.
Sex bulletin boards
A survey by a California company, wrote Peter Moon in an excellent story on the subject in the Globe and Mail last July, found that the sex bulletin boards were among the ten most looked at Internet services in the world. They may include serious discussions of sexuality, but according to Moon a small part of the material is obscene by any definition. “Well, if this doesn’t get us all shut down, probably nothing will,” said the anonymous author of a graphic story about the violation of a 12-year-old girl.
The question of the acceptability of such material has come up in Canadian university bulletins; but the universities on the whole have tended to defend freedom of speech and allow freedom for pornography.
Winnipeg
There are two exceptions cited by Moon. Stories dealing with rape, bestiality, incest, and the torture of women turned up on the desk of the head of the Winnipeg Police vice squad. They came from a women’s group at the University of Manitoba.
Danishka Esterhazy said that many of the women found the material threatening and they objected to the university acting as a porn distributor for students. So the university took action; it cut off access to several of Internet’s sex groups.
Simon Fraser University took similar action, not just because of protests by women’s groups, but also because of the fact that public funds support the computer operations, and the fact that the university makes Internet available to B.C. schools.
The director of computer services at Simon Fraser said that it was as if someone wanted Playboy or Penthouse; the university library would not supply it.
Difficult to control
Computer porn is not easy to deal with. It may be produced by someone outside Canada and it travels over a world-wide network. Also the universities, which ought to be more concerned with it than they are, are just as afraid as Ontario’s Robert Payne of the terrifying word “censorship.”
Patricia MacVicar, a constable with Project P, the Ontario Provincial Police section dealing with pornography, says that there is no doubt that there is obscenity in the computer network but that it is difficult to prove, and extremely difficult to lay charges.
Women’s groups to be commended
Perhaps in the long run the women’s groups will have a beneficial effect, at least in this one case. Danishka Esterhazy told Peter Moon that a girl student could walk into a computer laboratory and find a picture of a woman being raped on the screen near her – or hear males laughing as they read about a woman being tortured – or have to wait while a male student got a printout of an obscene photograph of a woman.
Where there is a will, there is a way; if Simon Fraser and the University of Manitoba can take corrective action, other universities ought to have enough backbone to do the same thing, to eliminate what is clearly degrading and dehumanizing.
Pro-lifers should support the groups fighting this corruption.
