As won­der­ful as the Inter­net has been in mak­ing knowl­edge access­able and expand­ing per­sonal net­works, it has brought things into our homes that would have been unimag­in­able to past gen­er­a­tions.  It shouldn’t have to be this way. We need to have a choice.

Accord­ing to the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics in 2002, nine out of 10 chil­dren aged between eight and 16 had viewed pornog­ra­phy on the Inter­net at some point in their lives. A study pub­lished in “Pedi­atrics” in 2007 con­cluded that 42% of chil­dren aged between ten and 17 had been exposed to online pornog­ra­phy dur­ing the “pre­vi­ous 12 months.” In most cases, the sites were accessed unin­ten­tion­ally when a child, often in the process of doing home­work, used a seem­ingly inno­cent sound­ing word to search for infor­ma­tion or pic­tures. This is com­pletely unac­cept­able. One of our basic human rights should cer­tainly be to have our chil­dren do their home­work with­out our hav­ing to worry about pornog­ra­phy!

Noth­ing has hap­pened since those stud­ies to allow fam­i­lies and oth­ers to have access to the Inter­net with­out hav­ing to worry about inap­pro­pri­ate mate­r­ial show­ing up. And noth­ing will hap­pen, unless we take a stand and pres­sure Con­gress to give us a safe alternative.

Please take a stand today by sign­ing the peti­tion and for­ward­ing it to oth­ers. If you can, put the website/petition on your Face­book, Twit­ter account or an orga­ni­za­tional web­site. Thank you for charg­ing forward!