LGBTQ Online Youth – Ethical and Legal Issues in Information Seeking
April 2, 2015
The ethical and legal issues related to my information community are complex, contentious, and plentiful. This is primarily because of age, but also because of identity. Identifying as LGBTQ can be in direct opposition to one’s family, religious, or community standards, and therefore access to information is all the more critical.
LGBTQ youth who seek information online often do so because of a lack of offline support for their identity (or identity questioning). However, when accessing information through their school or public library, certain laws, regulations, and local practices can prevent youth from encountering or experiencing the very information that they are seeking for their own self-realization.
The Code of Ethics of the ALA upholds individuals’ rights to library service without discrimination, without personal belief interference, and with confidentiality. That position statement should give comfort to those who feel that libraries should (and must) serve as an open, unbiased, non-partisan, non-parochial source of information. And, indeed the ALA, along with the ACLU, has fought (and won) legal battles on these grounds (against the Communications Decency and the Children’s Online Protection Acts).
However, because minors are seen as a class of citizens in need of protection, not all freedoms have been upheld for them. The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), enacted in 2000 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003, requires that libraries receiving government subsidies or federal grants must utilize filtering software on their public computers so that children are protected from viewing (or seeing others viewing) pornography or other harmful material.
The ALA, along with their Freedom to Read Foundation, led the fight against CIPA in the courts. One of their arguments is of particular interest to the LGBTQ youth community: “Filters block many legitimate sites, not just pornographic ones.” They noted that studies of Internet filter providers showed that many have ties to conservative religious groups and use religious concepts as well as sexual terms to block content (Hansen, 2015).
Because of CIPA, critical resources dealing with sexual or gender identities may be blocked by filtering systems, preventing youth from accessing important information. Among some sectors, same-sex attraction and gender identity are considered pornographic in and of themselves.
Hillier et al (2012) suggested that monitoring and filtering of web content for LGBTQ youth can be a source of even more danger than what they may encounter without these measures. And filtering has been noted as noted as a particular concern for rural LGBTQ youth populations where Internet access is more likely done through schools or libraries (GLSEN, 2013).
CIPA puts libraries and librarians in the terrible position of choosing between vital funding streams and upholding their professional and ethical obligations to the free flow of information. And it puts LGBTQ youth in jeopardy of being denied identity-affirming (and sometimes life-affirming) information.
References:
GLSEN (2013). Out online: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth on the internet. Retrieved from www.glsen.com
Hansen, D. (2015). Intellectual freedom and american law. Lecture 1, Module 9, LIBR 200. Intellectual Freedom and American Law.pdf.
Hansen, D. (2015). Intellectual freedom and the web. Lecture 2, Module 9, LIBR 200. Intellectual Freedom and the Web.pdf.
Hillier, L., Mitchell, K. J., & Ybarra, M. L. (2012). The internet as a safety net: Findings from a series of online focus groups with LGB and non-LGB young people in the United States. Journal Of LGBT Youth, 9(3), 225-246.