BackTalk: Filtering Is Not the Answer

A while back, I got a glimse of the new filtered library world when a patron asked me for online information on Atlanta-area hospitals. We pulled up a list on USA/Business Reference, but we were blocked from seeing a full record on one hospital from a new terminal that had filtering software. At the nonfiltered computer at the desk, I found that the naughty medical establishment dealt in prosthetics for breast cancer survivors. We then went to a nonfiltered reference terminal that could give this full-grown woman information on possible hospital employers.

My library has since rejiggered the filtering system, so patrons can fullly access the databases we pay for. We have had to deal with the filtering out of the web sites of a community economic development organization, radio host Bruce Williams, nanotechnology, and more. Fortunately, adults are allowed to circumvent the filtering and continue their filthy forays.

Many things chip me off about federal- and state-mandated filtering systems, and the same things have probably chipped you off. The software is a pig in a poke, with filtering criteria that is a "trade secret." Those criteria are unknown and usually ridiculous. Much of what is banned is not pornographic, merely controversial. The bar is set far above porn just to make sure that the most socially conservative audience won't be offended and will therefore buy the filter for home computers.

Beyond that, this is another instance where libraries bear the burden of society's pretense at caring about a serious issue. Politicians and parents agree that children should be protected from seeing naked virtual people in a public library.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, a proponent of parental responsibility who regularly blasts women for putting their kids in daycare, puts the responsibility of child supervision in libraries squarely on—the library. Some profilter folks ignore the issue by arguing that children are exposed to Internet porn when their parents "turn their heads for a moment." People who work in libraries know better. If filtering proponents ever set foot in a library they would see lots of children running around with no real adult supervision for hours, among some very dubious adults who have been known to get naked in the nonvirtual flesh.

Why are these troublemakers in the library in the first place? Mostly it is because our society doesn't like to make difficult decisions about what kind of behavior can get people banned from public places. Courts are reluctant to hand down hard decisions on when people lose their right to use a public space, so libraries are not empowered to throw out people with destructive or antisocial behavior and keep them out.

The public library community has responded to these threats to public safety in various ways. Some work with prosecutors in temporarily banning violent or disruptive patrons. In the early 1990s, the Morristown Free Library, NJ, banned a patron who was thought to be menacing other patrons and went through a protracted court battle when he sued. The American Library Association and its board gave no sympathy to that embattled library. Enough library lovers, and even administrators, were infatuated with the concept of the library as a public gathering place with perfect First Amendment rights that they refused to support a sister institution. More tragically, some libraries have chosen not to have a concerted policy until disaster strikes.

Libraries have become daycare centers for the homeless and mentally ill, another thing parents and legislators would be shocked to hear. We won't pony up to pay for the care of the mentally ill, and we dodge hard decisions about involuntary commitment for people who have lost the capacity to make their own. We are proud to have abandoned the old-fashioned mental hospital snake pits and now condemn the mentally ill to the al fresco snake pits of the public streets. In this cultural accident waiting to happen, our society and its representatives calm us by putting filters on library Internet terminals and call it a day.

We are not the only public servants left holding the bag for ostrich-like public policy. Police and correctional officers now find themselves psychiatric social workers, for which they did not prepare and the criminal justice system is ill equipped to handle. Pressuring public libraries to buy filtering software, while ignoring the other social and parental failures that put kids at risk in libraries, is the nonanswer we have come to expect from policymakers. Let's congratulate them for keeping library terminals safe for full-grown job seekers looking for work in Atlanta.

Linda Koss is Grants Specialist, Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, and Secretary/Treasurer of the Association of Public Library Employees (APLE). This article is modified from one published in the APLE newsletter, APLE Matters