Labeling and the Media

 

Well no.  I'm not a child.  I'm an adult.  I pay taxes, I vote, I can serve my country in the military, I own property, and I'm even allowed to drive in a carpool.  And like thousands of adoptees and birth families each year, I've found and reunited without ever accessing any of my governmental-sealed records. 

 

But even if I was to walk into a courtroom today (I was adopted in one of the 43 states that have sealed records) with both of my mothers by my side---adoptive and birth---in support, the government would still deny me access, because under their laws, the act of adoption makes me a "forever child" in the eyes of the state.   I have to be protected from my own information and original birth certificate.  Neener neener nanny boo-boo.

 

I'm not writing this in order to get into an open-records debate, but to illustrate how the media inadvertently or deliberately uses descriptors that incite emotional and/or misleading responses. 

 

Any reasonable person who reads "Adopted Children Seek Records" might immediately think "minor child".  Understandably, they would be thinking of a 12 or 15-year old (which is inaccurate---nobody is advocating opening records to minor adoptees), and not a 65-year-old grandmother who is a retired police chief.

 

So on that note, today I read an article (link is at the bottom of my post) about a librarian aide who was fired from her job for reporting a man who was viewing what she thought was child porn on the library computer.

 

He was a regular patron, and when she first walked by and realized that he was looking at pornographic pictures of boys, she contacted her supervisor (from what I gather this is a small county library satellite and she was the only employee who manned it).  Her supervisor told her to write him "a note" to tell him to stop it.

 

The employee didn't feel good about the response and went next door to ask the police what to do.  Small town.  :-)   The police told her to contact them if he did it again.  The next time she saw him viewing similar pictures she did. They arrested him, and they confiscated the computer for evidence.  The library supervisor called them and accused them of violating the patron's "privacy rights".  Gak.  The right to view any kind of porn on a public computer?  There is an expectation of privacy?

 

Ok, that's a debate in itself.  But not one I'm addressing.

 

Oh yeah.  They also fired the librarian aide that reported him. Another debate.

 

What I find disturbing is this:

 

Somewhat buried in this long and convoluted article, the reporter mentioned that the accused was deaf and was a diagnosed schizophrenic.   And nothing further.  That was it.

 

Ok, I can see some relevance to reporting the psychiatric disorder, although, if they're going to throw it out there, it would probably helpful to know if he was receiving treatment or not.  Or if they were going to use this tidbit of information, it would have been responsible journalism to point out that the tendency to view child porn isn't actually a symptom of schizophrenia.  Why?  Because there ARE people out there who believe that Jack and Rose were real people on the Titanic and might get the mistaken impression that schizophrenia = pedophilia.  Some people are weird that way.

 

And why bother to mention that he is deaf?  Is it relevant?  Are people who have deafness more likely than not to look at illegal porn? 

 

The guy was looking at child porn.  The end.  It's illegal, so arrest and charge him.  When you read articles about other offenders you don't ever see sentences that say:

 

"xxxxx is a library regular who is fat."

 

"xxxxx is a library regular who wears glasses."