9: Community Standards
Internet security in schools. We all want it, but how do we achieve it in schools while successfully tiptoeing around first amendment issues?
In the case of Religion v. Dancing (1984), Kevin Bacon always wins
Something I have not seen mentioned very often in discussions of internet security is the idea of community standards, which were discussed extensively during the 1980s with regard to the local sale or rental of pornography. Basically it is the local citizenry deciding on a community basis what is or is not acceptable. This was used successfully to ban certain sexual imagery from being owned in communities throughout Pennsylvania.
That is until someones decides that these community standards must change. A recent case of illegal community standards was highlighted in Louisiana, where a local Justice of the Peace refused to marry an ‘interracial’ couple. His reasoning? That’s always been the standard. Unfortunately his community standard was superseded by the national standard. Another less serious yet no less poignant example is when dancing was banned in the 1984 movie Footloose; the law banning dancing was based on a community standard that dictated dancing was lascivious behavior, and therefore the standards of that particular small town were not subject to national standards–that is until Kevin Bacon decided they were.
Schools are representatives of the community and are also charged with representing the best interests of their clientele, namely the students and their parents. So far everything I have read involving standards for internet usage on a national level are fairly ambiguous when it comes to matters of community standards (except in the case of child pornography, which supersedes any types of local prurient interest laws and is not subject to the Miller test. There is no leeway there.) Otherwise, the bulk of protection laws leave policing of appropriate content and dealing with free-speech issues up to the individual schools, and therefore, up to community standards, while simply mandating that appropriate measures must be put into place to ensure a level of safety and security.
According to Miller v. California (1973), in order for material to be deemed legally obscene, a court must determine the following:
1. Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
2. Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law;
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary and/or artistic, political, or scientific value.
This court opinion was written in 1973, many years before the advent of the Internet. It is much easier to apply “community standards” to, say, a local bookshop, but so far nearly impossible to apply it to materials that are transmitted via a non-centralized global network. Schools must decide for themselves what are acceptable materials for their clients, and how far censoring those materials must go before national standards are triggered.
