The American Library Association is hitting back at accusations from a Michigan family group that Internet porn available online at a library here may have influenced a rapist who hit a 10-year-old girl in the library's restroom last week.
An ALA spokesman, Linda Wallace, tells Conservative News Service the accusations from the American Family Association of Michigan was unfair at minimum. "It was outrageous," Wallace says.
AFA-Michigan president Gary Glenn blasted the library's lack of Internet filtering software, saying it lured pedophiles and porn addicts to the library. "Given the brutally violent nature of child pornography available on the Internet, we are thankful the little girl is alive," he says in a press release. "We believe it is fair to observe that this is exactly the type of incident an irresponsible policy invites. You can't put out bait for pedophiles and be surprised."
Police here say an unidentified man hid in a basement restroom at Hackley Public Library on Nov. 2 and raped the girl while her father waited upstairs in the children's book section. Police are said to have several leads and a sketch of one suspect from an amateur artist who told a regional newspaper she got a quick look at him while using the library.
But the library itself says there's no evidence the suspected attacker had accessed Net porn on the library computers, or had even been seen in the Internet access area by anyone using the library, CNS says.
"I don't think he's a regular library user known to us," said Martha Ferriby,
But Glenn says the library is only paying lip service to protecting area children from Net porn and violence, doing nothing to stop a pedophile who succeeded in not being caught.
Library officials disagree with Glenn's charges of lax viewing policies, CNS says.
"We use people, and we have close staff monitoring. Pornography is not viewed at Hackley Library," says director Martha Ferriby.
Wallace, though, acknowledges some library patrons might use libraries to watch or read porn. Libraries are normally safe places, she tells CNS, "but they are also public places."
