Porn Proof Your Child



Porn Proof Your Child

Signal Bleed and Other Tricks
© 2009 Teresa Cook


Boy Viewing Filtered Images
When our teenaged son Brandon admitted he was addicted to pornography, my husband and I were shocked to learn he had been watching pornographic cable channels on our living room television. Since we only subscribed to basic cable, carefully avoiding movie channels such as HBO and Cinemax, we couldn't understand how x-rated material had violated our home.
The next day, we called the cable company to insist they completely block the partially-scrambled channels Brandon had stumbled upon. It took five phone calls over a two-week period to get a technician to our home. Why? I wondered. Don't they care children are being exposed to pornography?

A few months later, I read an article about signal bleed, a term used in the cable industry to mean "those visual images or sounds that can be seen or heard despite some form of scrambling or blocking." Prohibited by the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), signal bleed became permissible again in 1999 when the U. S. Supreme Court struck down parts of the CDA as unconstitutional. A cable company could once more, according to the article, "intentionally signal bleed pornography as part of its effort to attract new subscribers."1 Now I understood the purpose of the peep shows our son saw and the company's foot-dragging when we asked them to block these channels.
Today the law still allows cable companies to signal bleed. Section 504 of the CDA, however, does require cable companies to "fully scramble or block the audio and the video of a programming service that a customer does not subscribe to at no charge to the subscriber." The catch is that you, the subscriber, must request blocking on channels you don't want.2 So if you enjoy cable but want to protect your children, you have to:
  • Check out all the channels to which you don't subscribe—which can take a while since a partially-scrambled station alternates between a blank, fuzzy, or tilted screen and a clear picture, so you will have to watch each station for several seconds to determine if it's completely blocked.
  • Call the cable company—sometimes repeatedly—to request a filter or "trap" on channels with offensive material.
  • Verify the channels are completely filtered.
All this to rid your home of channels you never subscribed to in the first place. And if you don't like some of the stations you receive as part of a programming package (such as MTV), you may have to pay for additional mechanisms to block them. The government doesn't require cable operators to block objectionable stations if they're included as part of a package deal. See http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/objectionabletv.pdf for more information. (Also see "Plug the Holes: More Gaps.".)

Signal bleed allows cable companies to garner more customers, but it also serves pornographers' objective of exposing more children to pornography. Their goal: to cultivate a new generation of addicts who will pour millions of dollars into the porn industry. Other approaches include:
  • Disguising pornography as health magazines calculated to draw teen boys who want to improve their physiques.
  • Making pornographic movies available in hotel rooms (see "Is Your Hotel Spotless?").
  • Masking pornographic web sites as child-friendly pages geared toward topics children search for, such as pets, popular cartoon characters, toys, pop singers, or brand names (i.e. Disney, Barbee, etc.)
  • Using "stealth sites" that mimic real web sites with slight misspellings or different endings, such as .com instead of .gov.3
  • Including samples of porn on non-pornographic web sites.4
  • Printing sexually explicit pictures in clothing catalogs and teen magazines.
Pornographers continually devise new ways to hook children into looking at pornography, making our job as parents more demanding. Take the important steps of talking with your children about porn (see "The Porn Talk"), filtering your computer and cable channels, and staying up to date on technology trends (subscribe to NetFamilyNews at http://www.netfamilynews.org/subscribe.htm). Together we can work to stay one step ahead of the pornographers.




 

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