Stop Blaming the Internet. There is an increasing amount of blame being placed on the Internet as the source of corruption in teenagers and children. One source of fear comes from news articles concerning youth that are making explosives from the easily f

Mainly, the burden being placed on the Internet is a displacement of the blame that should be put on the parents themselves. The cause for deviant behavior in children often is not the result of media, but lack of parental guidance and support. As Wilkins suggests, "the easiest solution [to blocking access to 'indecent material' on the Internet] is to keep the family computer in a well-traveled space, like a living room, so that parents can monitor what their children download" (2). One friend of mine, who prefers to stay anonymous, built a pipe bomb as an adolescent, before the Internet existed, and admitted in retrospect that he did it because he could; with both parents working and him home alone, he was able to do what he wanted.

Most importantly, by focusing on the "evils of the Internet," politicians and legislators, parents and the media are all straying away from the more pressing issues. The main issue is violence and deviance among adults themselves-not the electronic "brainwashing" media. Mike Males writes about this issue in his article entitled, "Stop Blaming Kids and TV." As he says, "All sides seem to agree that fictional violence, sex on the screen, Joe Camel, beer-drinking frogs, or naked bodies on the Internet pose a bigger threat to children than do actual beatings, rape or parental addictions" (3). Males gives incredible statistics which prove that deviance among adults towards children greater than deviance attributed to the electronic media. He says how the Institute for Alternative Media emphasizes, 'the average American child will witness 200,000 acts of [TV] violence' by the time that child graduates from high school"(4). He goes on to say that, "None of these varied interests note that during the eighteen years between a child's birth and graduation from high school, there will be fifteen million cases of real violence in American homes grave enough to require hospital emergency treatment" (5). He also refers to the 150-page study from Carnegie scholars, "Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century," which according to Males, devotes only two-sentences to household violence (6).

The biggest problem then concerning the Internet is the way the media and others are blowing the issue out of proportion. As Wilkins says in her article, we are not doing our "moral duty" through censoring the Internet, rather we are creating "moral panic" in our preoccupation with Internet censorship. She goes on to say, "Through sensationalized reporting, certain forms of the behavior become classified as deviant" (7). This seems to resonate well with the issue at hand; children have in the past been looking at pornography and playing with explosive material, but now the news media has succeeded in making this behavior seem the result of corruptive material-hence deviant behavior. Wilkins goes on to say that, "It is important to bear in mind that children are still a minority of Internet users" (8). So, in reality, the problem not only is misdirected, but it is not nearly as big a problem as the news makes it out to be.

Wilkins also gives the example of Time magazines article that according to her sparked the debate on Internet censorship. This article published on July 3, 1995 and placed on the cover, entitled, "On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn," printed false statistics, which later were used in a Congressional hearing on Internet Censorship. The main statistic quoted was from Marty Rimm's report from the _Georgetown University Law Journal_ in which he stated that a whopping 83.5 percent of the Internet graphics are pornographic, when it actually is less than 1 percent (9). We cannot unquestionably believe statistics even if they are from a reputable magazine like Time. So do not blame the Internet without all the facts-there is much more to the issue of corruption of youth than the Internet.