According to a county Board of Supervisors policy, the Malibu Library is unable to stop customers from using computers to view pornography.
By Paula Kashtan / Special to The Malibu Times
After a resident complained last week about a man watching pornography and behaving lewdly in front of a Malibu Library computer, a county library official said librarians by law cannot prevent patrons from watching pornography.
When Malibu resident Leanne Thomas went to the library last week to use the computer to print out her resume, she saw another patron watching explicit content on a library computer. Thomas said the patron appeared to be a homeless man.
She complained to a librarian, but was told nothing could be done. Thomas says she then went to the Malibu Library manager Katharine Schwartz, who told her the man watched pornography at the library regularly. She echoed the first librarian, however, with her denial that anything could be done to stop the man. Thomas also said Schwartz told her “when the library expands and gets bigger, he’ll have more of a private area.”
Schwartz declined to comment for this story, directing questions to the county library office.
“We have an official policy that was established by the Board of Supervisors, developed in accordance with Supreme Court rulings,” Margaret Donnellan Todd, County Librarian, told The Malibu Times Monday. “On adult computers we have a filter for visually explicit sexual material. Users can ask us to remove that filter, which we must do-it’s a Supreme Court ruling.”
Todd continued, “Porn is just a word. There’s no legal definition of it, and since constitutional lawyers don’t have a clear definition of the word, we don’t ask librarians to try to figure it out.”
Part of what Thomas saw, though, wasn’t acceptable, even by the library’s standards.
“The man was looking at porn, and the man was doing a little dance with his headphones on, and grinding,” Thomas said.
According to Todd, this is a violation of the law and a matter for law enforcement officials.
“Watching porn is very different from performing behaviors. We don’t tolerate that kind of activity in our libraries,” Todd said.
Enforcement in such instances sometimes results in law enforcement officials being called to the library to escort out the violator, while other times a warning from library staff is enough to stop the behavior.
In terms of pornography alone, there is some protection. All computers in the children’s area are filtered for acceptable content, and if parents want their children to have unfiltered access, they must go to the adult section of the library. There is also wireless Internet access at the library, and that is filtered as well. The computers also have privacy screens, which Todd says “aren’t perfect” but do make it difficult to see what’s happening on a computer unless you’re standing right behind it.
Librarians are allowed to ask users to move to a different, less visible computer if they are looking at something provocative or potentially offensive in a public area, but patrons are not bound to cooperate.
“Sometimes they say, ‘I have a right to view this and I’m going to view it.’ And they do have that right,” Todd says. She adds that if library goers are disturbed by what a fellow patron is looking at online, they are free to call law enforcement on their own.
The one exception to this rule is child pornography. If a library employee catches someone looking at what appears to be child porn or receives a complaint that such a thing is going on, they are to immediately call law enforcement.
Thomas said she complained because she was concerned that “children could see it. It was at eye level.”