Recently my library dealt with a pretty unfortunate situation.
We have a regular young teen patron who loves coming into the library to play on the computers. She's homeless. Even during the times in her life when she is not homeless, her homelife is so chaotic, she might as well be. This patron is well-behaving most of the time, all things considered. But when she makes mistakes, they tend to be pretty significant. An example of one of the goofier shenanigans she pulled was when she brought a stray cat into the library and it made a mess.
Earlier this year she got caught viewing pornography. We shut her computer off for the night and then went and talked to our security team. The punishment for this young teen, as per our security team, was a year-long ban from the library computers. Every youth librarian in my department pushed back on this punishment. Year-long bans is what we do for adult patrons, and it didn't seem fair to us that a young teen be treated the same as an adult. The security team responded that they could have banned her from the library for a year, not just the computers, so they felt like they were giving her a lenient punishment.
Eventually, to make matters more complicated, it came out that the porn in question could have been sent to her without her consent. According to this patron, she was chatting with an adult man on Discord, who sent her nude photos of himself that she didn't ask for. To be clear, this is a federal crime, even if she did ask for them. Obviously this is a situation that is different than a patron looking up videos on Pornhub or similar websites. Would we ever punish a child who was flashed in the library? No! So why are we doing the equivalent to a teen victim? When we brought this up to our security team, their choice to ban her from the computers for a year remained in place. In my opinion, the whole situation was handled extremely poorly.
I felt like I was going crazy. Why were we providing young teens with the same consequences as we would adult patrons? Why did the nature of the images that were sent, and how the teen could not legally consent to the images being sent to her, not impact our punishment, even a little? And why were the suggestions of the librarians, including the youth/teen manager, being completely ignored when considering appropriate punishment?
The youth department are still fighting for this patron, and the story isn't fully told yet. One of the ways that I want to help this patron is figuring out how other libraries would handle similar situations so I can suggest changes to our policies and procedures. Specifically, I want to know 1) how libraries typically handle minors viewing pornography and 2) if there are any steps that libraries have in place to help protect victims of grooming, specifically in situations that involve pornography.
So, I went to my Instagram and ran a survey!
A survey ran on an Instagram story is not perfect. There is bias built into the platform, there is very little way to efficiently get longer form feedback, the format of the questions are a little limited in how you can answer, etc. but it is also accessible and easy, which makes it good enough for our purposes.
The results of the survey are in and we had a little less than 400 people respond. This is a very good size for a response, and there were a lot of great comments that were sent to me.
Let's get into the results!
Does your library allow adults to view porn on the computer?
15% - Yes, but with limitations (such as must have screen protector, headphones, not be in view of children, etc.)
83% - No, never
2% - Yes
How does your library handle teenagers looking at porn in the library?
29% - Ban them from the library for a period
32% - ban them from the computers for a period
19% - Other (please explain)
19% - no official action is typically taken
If you do punish the teenagers, is the punishment the same as what you would do for the adults?
70% - yes
30% - No
If you do ban teenagers from the library or from the library computers for viewing porn, how long is the ban in effect?
36% - A week or less
32% - a month or less
23% - 2-6 months
9% - 1 year
Does your library have any policy or practices in place to help protect teenagers that may be getting groomed (example: an adult sending pornography to a minor)
17% - Yes
83% - No
Lets go ahead and break down what I think these numbers tell us.
If you are not aware, some libraries do, in fact, allow patrons to view pornography. Not only are there archives of vintage pornography, some public libraries allow people to view porn, as we see in the results of this survey. Most public libraries that allow pornography require some limitations on that porn viewing, such as requiring headphones or screen protectors. Many libraries don't have a choice of if they can allow porn or not, as many states have laws that prevent any state funding go to an organization that allows porn to be viewed. Some comments I received from library workers who work in libraries that allow pornography viewing:
if it’s just LOOKING and there isn’t anything else going on, we have privacy screens for our public computers and we move them to a different computer where there’s no one near them. If it’s on their own device, we don’t monitor that, really. If it’s something noticeable, we just ask them to not have volume up, not be around other people, etc. The only time they’d be suspended from the library is if they’re being loud about it or if they’re masturbating
soooo when i worked in the [redacted] library system, the policy was that we couldn’t do anything about what a patron was viewing or accessing. if a patron saw what someone was watching, we’d have to explain that we could only kick them out if they were being vocally or physically crude and vulgar regarding viewing porn
As long as it's not child pornography, it's legal and we can't prohibit it due to our intellectual freedom policy (although we can ask people to voluntarily move, for example, if they're making others uncomfortable... Not sure what the policy for TEENS is since they're technically minors...)
But as you can see, vast majority of respondents of this survey work in libraries that do not allow porn. Here are some of the comments from these respondents for how their library would handle a situation where teens were breaking policy by viewing porn:
It's 3 strikes you're banned from computer use for adults. Tbh I don't think we've ever had the issue go beyond 3 strikes for teens, most have smartphones to access porn on & it's more popular for them to leave hate speech/symbols up on print release stations & catalogue computers where you can't track who did it.
For a first offence, I believe they get a warning and they may be asked to leave for the day. It usually takes the establishment of a pattern before they will get banned.
Our protocol for any inappropriate behavior is usually: they have to leave for the day, if it reoccurs it most likely is a ban until their parents talks to the youth services manager.
We give one warning to all customers, any age, then ban them.
Ban them until a parent acknowledges that this happened
Typically for anyone at my library watching porn we tell them "that's not library appropriate" and if they stop they can stay, and if not they have to leave for the day. If they're touching themselves that's more of a ban.
generally a warning first, discretely showing them the policy. 2nd offense is a limited ban, 3rd offense is final removal
We give them a warning first then suspend them for the rest of the day if it's repeated. If they keep doing it we suspend them for longer and longer periods. Same with adults.
Porn for anyone is a warning and then maybe a break for the day before any major action is taken.
Typically they are handed a brochure about patron conduct
Most respondents work in libraries where there is not a difference between adult and minor policy violations. Many people provided some commentary on their thought process:
Usually consequences for teens are a degree down from adults - a week for excessive swearing for adults + followup with security or branch head is asking the teen to leave for the day and leave the reinduction convo for third strike. Unless it's like setting fireworks off in the library or pickpocketing people or stealing laptops, in which case it's a policy not to involve police unless we think the teen is being, like, trafficked or gang initiated, then it's a more adult-length ban.
We have a lesser time for kids- after warning, the 1st time is a day, 2nd a week, 3rd a month. Adults the first time after the warning it goes straight to a month, then 6, then a year.
We have a warning system and we practice restorative practices by bringing them back in for volunteer work or speaking to Safety, taking accountability etc. We never ban, and the longest we suspend is a year (hardly ever happens).
they’re kids and we never escalated any behavioral issues in the way we would with adult patrons. for the most part this worked ok for us and our kids straightened out or occasionally stopped coming to the library on their own
I'm a teen librarian in Maine and we would probably have them stop immediately then have a private conversation and also explain how and why thats not allowed in the library (for a multitude of reasons) we've had great success with behavioral corrections when reminding teens this is a shared space for other teens. It doesn't happen often but we've had instances in similar veins of behavior.
As for having policies in place for teens who we expect are getting groomed, most people do not have specific policies in place. Here are some comments:
we have safe guarding officers that we report any concerns to welfare of children/young people/vulnerable adults and they would report anything staff have witnessed to social work. All staff have a responsibility for child welfare.
Like if it happens on library property and we can prove identity we'd def ban them for sexual harassment/misconduct but tbh if we could prove it we'd probably call the police. If a teen reported it but couldnt prove it we'd absolutely keep an eye on the customer and try to make the kid feel safe and tbh, probably call the police. I am not pro calling the cops all the time (like at all) but in this case i would
The general sentiment among many comments were that this is not a problem among teenagers for their libraries, and typically it is more of a problem with adult men.
The teen computers are filtered so they can't get porn. If they're on the adult computers we would treat it like any other adult watching porn I would guess. Thankfully we have never had it come up!
Don't really have an issue with teens. It's old men mostly
We've literally never had this issue with teens, only ever adults. The only thing that was close was we once had a teen on their own personal computer making a really racist slideshow or something and another patron complained so we kicked them out for the day.
They get asked to leave for the day, same as adults. But I've never actually seen it happen. The grown men, on the other hand . . .
Anyway! I found all this information fascinating and I wanted to share with you all in case you also found it interesting!