Friday, June 03, 2005

Pornification of America, Part XXX

Candidate for mom of the year:

A mother faces criminal charges after she hired a stripper to dance at her 16-year-old son's birthday party. Anette Pharris, 34, has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and involving a minor in obscene acts. The boy's father, the stripper and two others also face charges.

"I tried to do something special for my son," Pharris said. "It didn't harm him." [emphasis added]

This attitude is familiar to me, since I work in a public pornarium -- I mean, a public library. Kicking people off of our 22 public access computers for porn viewing is a routine affair even in a wealthy community like Fleming Island. Most of the offenders are teenagers. What's surprising is when confronted, they are sometimes genuinely surprised -- they didn't know that accessing cyberporn would be considered wrong. This response is even more disturbing than the dirty old man who is ashamed when caught.

3 comments:

John said...

My "favorite" part is where she complained that the police have not right to tell her what she can show her son.

Forgetting for a moment the issues this kid will have about his Mom being such a driving force in his early sexual encounters (ughhhh,) what right did she have to expose ten other teens to a stripper?

That said, at this point, having worked with teens since I was one, I cannot say I find this story shocking. Sad and wrong, but not shocking.

Jeff the Baptist said...

Ughh I feel sorry for you. I remember when I was doing literature review for my Master's one summer. The microfiche machines were next to the public access terminals. *shudder*

I can't think of how many teenagers and pre-teenagers who were looking at porn on them and better yet, shouting at me saying "hey man you wanna see some of this!". I suppose I should expect it from parents who are basicly using a college library to watch their kids.

John said...

The 'public library as free day care' is a common phenomenon. Most, if not all public libraries have unattended child policies. Enforcement varies.

Before my present employer, I worked at the main library of downtown Jacksonville. The neighborhood prostitutes used to drop off their kids at the library before heading off to work. This became a problem when we closed at 8 and the mothers had not returned.