Week 9: Conference Time!
We had another busy week leading up to Saturday’s conference. I finished my short research paper on child online privacy protection in the United States on Tuesday and spent the rest of the week working on my presentation and planning my moderating duties with my host partners, Mingyuan and Christine. Saturday’s conference was the Sixth Annual International Student Forum on Public Interest Law, and the topic this year was International Child Online Protection. The conference was co-hosted by Zhicheng and CUPL (China University of Political Science and Law – where most of the interns go to school), and it was held on CUPL’s northern campus.
Throughout the day, we students got the chance to present on the research we’ve been working on these last few weeks. As I mentioned before, I also got to be a host/moderator at the conference, and that turned out to be a lot of fun! I was nervous at first, as I always am when it comes to speaking publicly, but as the day went on (the conference ran from 9:00am to 4:00pm), I became more comfortable. I still need practice, but I enjoyed being a host very much, and I’m thankful I was given the opportunity!
In addition to our student speakers, the conference also welcomed several foreign guests to serve as commentators. First, we had a former judge who practiced in the ninth administrative judicial region of Texas but who currently lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia (my home state!). He spoke about the Supreme Court and how he thinks they may be interpreting the Constitution incorrectly by adhering so strictly the first amendment even when it comes into seemingly direct confrontation with the better protection of our children. He had pretty strong words for Internet providers, saying that they should have more responsibilities and be open to more liability when it comes to protecting children online. He also said we should encourage that children spend more time with their families and that we teach more values in school. He stressed being kind to each other, and promoted the need to change our society and how we treat each other if we want to fix other complex issues we face. It was a very moving speech! Next, we had a business law professor from Ohio State University speak about the difficulty of holding Internet providers and website operators liable because of the tendency of consumers to agree to terms and conditions they don’t read. These terms and conditions often include clauses that absolve websites from all liability for privacy issues that come up. We had a professor from the University of Michigan Law School talk about cyberbullying and how he thought it wasn’t much different from traditional bullying. He posed the question of whether we should have separate cyberbullying laws/criminal penalties or if we should incorporate cyberbullying into laws we already have. Finally, we had a Scottish International Human Rights Professor from Newcastle University in the U.K. speak again about the difficulty of holding Internet Service Providers accountable, but she focused on the difficulty in finding out who is really to blame and how hard it is to capture the culprit when they are able to route their data through multiple countries. After everyone finished our presentations and we heard from our last commentator, Professor Wang Qiang of CUPL handed out certificates to all of the student presenters and then gave a closing speech. I said a few final words thanking everyone for their participation, and then it was over!
I was surprised to see that they published our research papers in a booklet that was handed out to all of the conference attendees! I love having this tangible, professional-looking token of acknowledgement to everyone’s hard work. I will keep it forever to commemorate my time here at Zhicheng. It has been a wonderful experience, and I can’t believe it’s almost over.
That was all the excitement I had this week other than having a bad cold. We were planning on going to the Temple of Heaven yesterday (Sunday), but I was exhausted! So other than going to Wal Mart and making some rice noodle soup (not out of the packet!), I was lazy and watched movies all day. This week at work, Emily and I will be working on our next “Friday Focus” for the Facebook/Twitter page. Last week, we posted an article that we wrote with Anna on age of consent laws in China and compared it to the laws in Australia and the U.S. Our next topic is on gender neutrality in sexual assault laws. In China, rape is still considered primarily a crime against females.
That’s all for this week! Below I have some pictures from Yonghe (Lama) Temple from last week and a couple of pictures of me and the interns right after the conference.
