Holly Doel-Mackaway, a child rights adviser with Save the Children, shocked many of us last week at the UNSW filtering forum when she spoke out against mandatory ISP filtering. I guess too many of us are used to hearing the “even if it doesn’t work, it’s still good” argument from Childwise, that we sometimes forget not all child welfare organisations are ignorant in relation to tech issues.
Holly holds the view that education of parents and children is the key to a safe Internet experience, something I’ve long agreed with.
Asher Moses at the The Age spoke with her about it:
She said the filter scheme was “fundamentally flawed” because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.
Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.
“Children are exposed to the abusive behaviours of adults often and we need to be preventing the causes of violence against children in the community, rather than blocking it from people’s view,” she said.
I’ll be writing about the UNSW forum tonight (and publishing in the coming days). See here for the LiveBlog we ran during the event.
Elsewhere on the web, Amnesty International has an article about the filter: Chinese firewall could be erected in Australia.
1 comment
Peter Mancer says:
Dec 1, 2008
The problem here is that two issues have been lumped together by the government which is causing confusion. One is the availability of child sexual abuse images on the Internet. The other is protecting children on the Internet. They are two different problems with two different solutions. Child protection agencies such as Childwise are in favour of blocking child sexual abuse Web sites on the Internet and I agree with that, even if they are not 100% effective as this can make a difference to the number of children being abused. Child safety on the Internet is all about education. Both issues need to be addressed by the government’s policies and if you read the documents relating to the EOI released by DBCDE you will see that they have separated these two issues for the live ISP trial.