Parents Fear Privacy for their Daughters

This week I was out of town and forgot my books so I decided to focus my blog entry on the article “High Tech or High Risks: Moral Panics about Girls Online” by Justine Cassell and Meg Kramer.
Cassell and Kramer assert that adults’ panic over young women using the internet is not entirely founded in fact because the prevalence of internet crimes has been greatly exaggerated by the media. The media often focuses attention on the most gruesome and frightening of isolated events, especially those against children, because we live in a culture of fear. Parents have become increasingly concerned about internet predators because of shows like “To Catch a Predator” and crime dramas on television, in addition to news coverage about pedophilia and child abuse. While these things do happen and happen often, crimes against children are most often committed by friends or family members, not strangers. This article gives many examples of society’s attempts to “protect” young women by restricting them from technology. In an age where many children are more tech savvy than their parents it is difficult to supervise and enforce adult-placed restrictions. Parents fear, that their young daughters will be corrupted by material on the internet and will be in danger of male predators that try and lure them into real-life relationships, undermines a woman’s ability to act on her own accord.
I found the history of women not being allowed to use certain types of technology, from the telegraph to the telephone, interesting. Society has often attributed negative characteristics to women who use communicative technologies. I did not realize that owning either the telephone or the telegraph was ever controversial in American society but it makes sense to compare that fear to the current concern over internet use. As the article states, “Historical evidence [shows] that women and young people have long appropriated technology to their own ends in culturally important ways, but that very appropriation has proved a danger to the established social order, and by proxy has diminished in particular the female users in the eyes of those around them; has rendered them, in fact, “a threat to societal values and interests” (62). To me it seems that throughout history, parents concern over technology has been largely due to fear about what girls do when they’re granted privacy, not whether or not they are safe.