Underager Policy

[Golden Apples Everywhere]

Okay, I-am-not-a-lawyer and all that, but one of my parents is, and one of my in-laws has managed day-care centers for the government for almost three decades.  I consulted them both on the issue of how to handle minors in this group.

Their consensus was unanimously in favor of a policy that forbids minors.  What we're doing is potentially physically dangerous, and by not discouraging minors to participate, we can absolutely be seen as encouraging them, especially if we answer their posts and offer them advice on how to continue.  Also, there's the issue of parental rights:  In most places, minors don't have the "right to do whatever they want" with their bodies like (ideally) adults do.  Parents, not kids, make the call on tattoos and piercings and medical treatment and diet -- and sleep schedule.  We might like the idea of educating kids rather than leaving them hanging about this, but we don't have the *right* to educate them, at least not directly.

And there is absolutely a liability issue, sayeth the attorney.  The Internet has been regulated for years when it comes to minors, and there's plenty of case-law (mostly involving porn, but hey) that would stand against us if a parent decided to sue.  Everyone who moderates here could be held liable in case of an accident, OR we could find our group shut down by parents who don't like our tone, just like a tattoo-shop could get shut down for showing kids how to tattoo themselves.

I asked what we should do, and it's looking like the LEAST we can do is incorporate language into the sign-up process that says that the group is 18-and-over, and that by signing up, you're claiming that you're over 18.  We don't have to track down liars (that's the parents' jobs still, thank goodness), but we do have to kick anyone we know with reasonable probability is a minor.  (We aren't responsible for knowing that it's them if they join back up under another name, but if they reveal their age again, we'd have to kick them again.)

I'd say it's up to the moderators to decide, now.  Anybody with an opinion ought to weigh in now...

-PD

[Michael Turner]

Thanks, PD. This is very useful. (Any word from them on the best
age-of-consent number? Is 18-and-over enough? Do we have to go to 21?)

It's also a real bummer for me. It sounds like my proposed "Don't
Ask, Don't Tell" policy is still too loose, and affords us no legal
protection at all -- it would amount to implicit instructions to the
underaged on how to post relatively freely here without getting bounced,
and instructions to everyone else on how to help the underaged from
outing themselves accidentally. I guess the policy has to be "NO
MINORS - NO EXCEPTIONS."

I'd like to leave previous postings by the self-declared under-18
contributors in the group archives, edited to contain a message
declaring that those members have since been unsubscribed because they
don't fit age-of-consent policies enacted since the posting. Some
similarly worded message might be edited into any direct responses to
those posting, where the responses are from adults.

I see two good reasons for this:

(1) Simple respect for the (former) underage member. After all, we
didn't have a policy, they may have had good things to say, some of
them might have been physically and mentally more mature than some
legal-adult posters on this group, and if so, banning them from this
group does little but make them victims of an arbitrary social standard
for adulthood: age of consent.

(If the question of adulthood were up to me, you'd have to pass a
coming-of-age test -- a test I don't think *I* could have passed before
I was 30, and that some people I've known could have passed at age 16.)

(2) If knowingly permitting the underage to post at all is a legal
liability, deleting the evidence only adds another -- possibly more
serious -- infraction. Deleting it all forever, everywhere, is
impossible anyway -- check out the Wayback Machine, and besides, some
e-mail might reside in folders on PCs. We might try to contact Yahoo
and get that old group expunged, since we can't retroactively enforce
policy there, and all the content has since been migrated.

I have tried to steer this discussion toward being as open as possible,
in part because an open discussion provides potentially admissable
evidence of good-faith efforts to formulate the most responsible policy.
After all, the risks don't go away after a bullet-proof policy is
adopted; past communications might come back to haunt us. Any such risk
is probably very small, and will decline over time, if only because
problematic contributors will eventually achieve age of consent. But
that risk may never drop to zero -- especially if polyphasic is found to
have long-term negative health effects. I think leaving existing posts
that would have violated the policy if we'd had it back them -- with a
disclaimer added -- is most consistent with the spirit of making
good-faith efforts to amend the situation, while providing the best
legal bulwark.

Incidentally, I recently received private e-mail about this discussion
from a declared underage member, apologizing for "breaking the rules",
saying he didn't know. I had to tell him: we don't have any rules
yet. I think this is evidence for the risks we face in not having a
very simple, clear policy about minors. After all, if it's not clear
to a minor from what we've said so far that there ARE no rules (yet)
about all this, how can we be sure that people -- especially minors --
understand what we say about the risks and the unkowns of polyphasic?
For an adult who runs into problems because of inattention or
incomprehension, our defense can be a snort of derision, and "What part
of ____ didn't you understand?" For a legal minor, we might be
defenseless against a parental argument that their child couldn't be
expected to understand -- even if they ARE quite capable of
understanding, and clearly DID understand.

I'm sure some people here feel I'm taking all of this way too
seriously. Maybe I am. But when I was a kid, I often visited my
parents (who were figure skating teachers) at work, where the entrance
to the ice surface of the skating rink had a sign saying "SKATE AT YOUR
OWN RISK." Words of one syllable, and yet ... at times, my parents'
income (which fed their seven children) was endangered by litigation
threats against the skating rink and doubts that the rink could insure
itself against them.

Recently that rink is slated for closure, because of health and
environmental concerns (sporadic ammonia refrigerant releases) that are
almost certainly negligible, and because of resulting equipment upgrades
that the rink couldn't really afford. Commenting on this, and the
trend away from sports with physical risks (are there any that don't)
one skating club member said "Maybe skating rinks are going the way of
bowling alleys." Yeah. And maybe what few bowling alleys still operate
are only a few sprained knuckles and bruised toes (and ambulance-chasing
lawyers) away from utter extinction.

America in particular is an increasingly litigious country, but it's not
the only one. With family sizes decreasing, parents seem to be getting
ever more protective of the fewer children they have. So it's probably
not going to get any easier for us -- unless polyphasic is somehow shown
to have long-term health *benefits*, even for the young, and formal
protocols are adopted for reducing the risks of the adjustment periods.
We may never see that day. In the meantime, our best bet is project an
aura of responsibility, respectability and caution, and to encourage
people here to live up to that image. It might have a "chilling
effect" on discussion, but it might also help. We'll have to just try
it out and see.

-michael turner
http://www.transcendentalbloviation.blogspot.com