Parent group sues over access to porn
Drew Paterson remembers when he and his wife realized their middle school daughter’s online school account in the Cherry Creek School District was linked to raw, unfiltered pornography.
“She calls to me, ‘You need to come here right now and see if I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing,’ ” Paterson said Wednesday. “It was just appalling. And the thought our middle school daughter could be exposed to that was just appalling.”
That day two years ago led to Wednesday’s filing of a lawsuit against a national contractor that sells online research databases to schools and the nonprofit Colorado Library Consortium, alleging they spread pornography to unsuspecting Colorado school kids.
Pornography is Not Education, a parent group led by the Patersons, alleges in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Arapahoe County District Court that databases provided by EBSCO Industries Inc., and distributed by the consortium, contain erotic and BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadomasochism) stories that could be located through innocent searches by kids and their parents.
Paterson said it’s unlikely EBSCO and the consortium embedded and distributed the pornography by mistake. “It’s difficult to believe they didn’t know,” he said.
EBSCO spokeswoman Kathleen McEvoy denied the allegations Wednesday, saying the company has worked to provide appropriate content to university libraries, public libraries, school libraries and other organizations for more than 70 years.
“To be clear, EBSCO does not include pornographic titles in its databases, embed pornographic content in its databases, or receive revenue for advertising for any organization,” McEvoy said.
“We are appalled by the tenor of the allegations related to our intent and the inaccuracies of statements clearly made in absence of factual information.”
Jim Duncan, executive director of the the Colorado Library Consortium, declined to comment on the case.
The lawsuit against EBSCO and the library consortium claims parents have found in their child’s school databases a fulltext ebook entitled “Pornography in America: A Reference Handbook,” which contained live web links to a company hosting video pornography and promoting the pornography industry. Parents also found that benign searches for terms such as “robotics,” “girl’s stories,” “boy stories,” “grade 7 biology” and “respiration” retrieved links to “lust,” “bondage,” “sex toys” and “sexual positions,” the lawsuit alleges.
Parents found more than 100 instances of advertising for one particular largescale sex toy store and an alleged teen website that advises children to use plastic wrap to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, according to the lawsuit.
“Children don’t have to be looking for porn,” Robin Paterson, Drew’s wife, said in a statement. “They can stumble into it in these EB SCO databases. Imagine how that might affect your gradeschooler.”
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of the parents by the Thomas More Society, a national nonprofit law firm that describes itself as “dedicated to restoring respect in law for life, family and religious liberty.” It is asking that a judge issue an injunction stopping EBSCO and the consortium from providing databases that contain pornography to underage kids.
EBSCO, based in Birmingham, Ala., provides databases that contain thousands of scholarly and popular magazine articles for research projects. By last count, the company services 55,000 schools nationwide. It also works in Canada, Europe and South America, Drew Paterson said.
In September, the Cherry Creek School District cut ties to EBSCO after working with the company for a year to make sure objectionable content couldn’t be accessed through the database and to tighten search filters. The district said it was not satisfied with EBSCO’s results.
The consortium, Duncan said, provides a variety of infrastructure services to hundreds of libraries across the state. Public libraries, schools and academic libraries routinely ask the consortium to negotiate costsaving discounts on their behalf, including subscriptions to webbased educational and research products from vendors and publishers.
The Patersons complained for two years to Cherry Creek school administrators that they found inappropriate materials with simple database searches through their child’s EBSCO account.
Robin Paterson said she is happy with Cherry Creek’s decision to ultimately ditch EBSCO.
“But EBSCO still is sup plying its pornographic databases to school children in other school districts across Colorado,” Paterson said in a statement provided by the Thomas More Society.
“With this lawsuit being filed today, the other shoe has dropped. Now it’s time for EBSCO and the Colorado Library Consortium to do the right thing.”