Popular Online Database Leads School Kids to Porn

Millions of American kids in grades K-12 use a potentially dangerous library portal to complete school projects and find educational resources. Shockingly, this online resource is “intermixing links to hardcore pornography and other graphic sexual material with innocent educational resources accessed by school children," according to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).

A trusted library portal for kids is exposed!

EBSCO Information Services offers online library resources to public and private elementary, middle and high schools. But it has a dark side! EBSCO has been targeted as one of the “Dirty Dozen” posted this week by NCOSE. Out of all of the companies profiting from sexual exploitation and pornography, this one is the by far the most disturbing. In fact, NCOSE’s research has uncovered links from EBSCO online products to “torture porn sites and instructions for how young boys can pressure girls into trying dangerous sexual activities.”

What a breach of trust!

Although EBSCO promises “fast access to curriculum-appropriate content,” it’s actually a “system that bypasses school Internet filters, [and] brings the dark world of XXX to America’s elementary, middle, and high school children.”

How kids are being exposed to porn through an educational portal

Every parent needs to see this! Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director and VP of NCOSE, relates how simple, innocent searches in the EBSCO science database return explicit, pornographic results!

How EBSCO "Novelist" page pushes "Adult Erotica"

Unbelievable! If you sign into the portal as a student, you'll get adult content options! BUT if you sign in as a parent, you will NOT see any adult content! Am I getting jaded, or is this a conspiracy against parental oversight?!

To see a video of the types of pornographic content EBSCO is exposing children to, scroll down to the end of this post.

Check your local schools for EBSCO subscriptions

Does your local school use EBSCO? Find out! Here's information from NCOSE to show you how:

1. Go to your local school’s main website and navigate to the library page.
2. You will likely see a link to “online databases” or “research materials” somewhere on the page (you might have to poke around for it) and then click on that section. They usually have the databases they subscribe to listed right there.

If you see an EBSCO product, please email the National Coalition on Sexual Exploitation at public@ncose.com and provide the URL where you found this. Please include the school name, county and state in your email.

When EBSCO found out they were on the Dirty Dozen list, they called NCOSE and promised to make changes. It’s good to know that they want to be on the side of curbing sexual exploitation coming from school library resources, not promoting it. Here’s the update from NCOSE’s website:

EBSCO executives contacted NCOSE last night and have shared that they are concerned about the explicit and pornographic content accessible via their database and that they are actively working to develop new algorithms and better filtering systems. While EBSCO remains on the Dirty Dozen List until these improvements have been implemented system-wide and verified, NCOSE is encouraged by EBSCO’s response and will collaborate with the company in their process to better protect school children using their products.

EBSCO cannot fix this problem fast enough. Until they do, kids are at risk.

2020 Update: EBSCO is not on the 2020 Dirty Dozen list, but they ARE still on the Watch List. Click here to find out more.

Help us donate to NCOSE! It's a WIN-WIN!

The Dirty Dozen List is a brilliant way to get the attention of large corporations who are promoting sexual exploitation. However, it takes hundreds of hours of research by NCOSE staff to put this list together. If you’d like to support this amazing effort that is getting spectacular results every year, go here.

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What's the takeaway message for kids?

We are horrified that this kind of content is easily available to kids, but the fact that it comes through an approved library database portal is OUTRAGEOUS! And what message does this give to young students? That their school is OK with this content?

I am grateful to NCOSE for their Dirty Dozen List and their tireless efforts to hold corporations accountable for promoting sexual exploitation. Let's all work together to protect kids from pornography! We CAN DO it! The first step is helping kids to install their own internal filter--teaching them what pornography is and how to respond immediately when they see it.

An example of the inappropriate content on EBSCO

WARNING: The EBSCO site provides links to GoodReads where any child can go to read previews of violent pornography like the book entitled Candylicker featured in this video. These pornographic previews are shown in this video but not vocalized. If you don't want to read it, please don't. But this is PROOF of how easy it is for kids to access porn from a school-approved library database.

There's more information about the pornographic literature available through EBSCO's library portal on the NCOSE YouTube channel. For example, "EBSCO's Poetry and Short Story Reference Center pushing pornographic content to middle schoolers" video shows how a child can access that database and find titles like Derrick Mickelson's Cuddle Bed for Wayward Boys which include graphic descriptions of oral sex.