SCN: Censorship

[Steve]

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(Amy Benfer, Salon)---Marjorie Heins, a First Amendment attorney 
and the director of the Free Expression Policy Project at the National 
Coalition Against Censorship, has spent most of her professional 
life fighting censorship.  

Over the years, she says, she realized that she was constantly 
coming up against the assumption that censorship -- from obscenity 
laws to book banning to V-chips to Internet filters -- could be justified 
if the material in question presented clear "harm to minors."  

"Even people in the civil liberties camp," says Heins, "were of the 
mind that there is a great social necessity to censor material that 
minors are exposed to. The debate wasn't going anywhere -- it 
wasn't even a debate."  

What, exactly, is material that causes "harm to minors"? Is it 
"Huckleberry Finn" or the work of Maya Angelou? Violent video 
games or R-rated movies? Graphic sexual content or 
comprehensive sex education?  

Actually, as Heins found out, all of the above have been suppressed 
in the name of protecting children, despite the fact, she says, that 
social science has failed to provide convincing evidence that 
exposure to sexual or violent content has any negative impact on 
minors whatsoever.  

Heins decided to trace the history of American obscenity laws to find 
the roots of the "harm to minors" argument. The result is "Not in 
Front of the Children: 'Indecency,' Censorship, and the Innocence of 
Youth," a book that chronicles the ideological and political 
underpinnings of censorship from Plato to the Victorians to the 
present day.  

Not only have the First Amendment rights of adults been abridged in 
the name of protecting the innocence of youth, Heins argues; many 
times, obscenity laws have actually done more harm to minors than 
good. Because of censorship, many children have not been 
equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary for living in a 
democratic society, she says. In some cases, minors have been 
denied access to information -- like comprehensive sex education -- 
that could literally save their lives, maintains Heins.  

"I would like to move the political dialogue beyond the repetitive 
media bashing, censorship laws, restrictions on school libraries, 
Internet filters," says Heins. "It's reached the point of an epidemic. 
It's not advancing any social purpose."  

In a telephone interview from her office in New York, Heins spoke 
about the fallacy of the "harm to minors" argument, the 
insidiousness of V-chips and Internet filtering and her belief in the 
need to replace media censorship with media literacy.  

You were involved in ACLU vs. Reno, the case in which the Supreme 
Court ruled against the 1996 Communications Decency Act. In 
December 2000, Congress passed a law mandating Internet filters 
on all library computers if a library receives federal funds. Is a law 
mandating filters any less censorious than one that criminalizes 
certain kinds of content on the Web?  

The Communications Decency Act was a criminal law, based on an 
"indecent" or "patent offensiveness" standard. We had plaintiffs 
from Human Rights Watch to Planned Parenthood to Stop Prison 
Rape to Wildcat Press, a gay and lesbian press for teens [all of 
whom would have had their sites blocked under the act]. The 
Supreme Court agreed with us that "patent offensiveness" was a 
standard that was much too broad.  

After the defeat of the CDA, Internet filtering became more and more 
aggressively promoted by the manufacturers of the product and 
political leaders.  

In many ways, Internet filters are more insidious than a criminal law, 
because criminal law looks at the context: whether or not limiting 
access will be a deterrent, how many people will be affected and so 
on. But with an Internet filter, you have direct censorship with a very 
broad brush.  

All the filters have to rely on keywords. Some of them claim to be 
beyond the early, primitive days when they blocked out "breast 
cancer" and "breast of chicken," "Anne Sexton" and "sex 
discrimination."  

But there is no way that any of these companies can screen over a 
billion Web sites, many of which change daily, so they have to rely 
on mechanical means. And no matter how sophisticated your 
software, you are relying on a machine that identifies words and 
phrases. About a year ago, a company claimed it could find 
pornographic images. It turned out that their filters were blocking out 
landscapes!  

Here is another example: "At least 21" and "no one under 18" are 
key phrases that are often found on pornographic sites, though 
those sites often have a barrier anyway -- usually, you have to give 
a credit card number. But these phrases are also found in news 
reports. I'm looking at my screen right now: "At least 21 people were 
killed in Indonesia." That site was blocked by Cybersitter.  

On top of these examples of unintentional blocking, you also have 
intended blocking. Almost all of these filters intentionally block 
access to sex education. Like a lot of us, they can't distinguish 
between pornography and sex education.  

In your book, you point out that the idea that children must be 
"protected" from sexual knowledge is a relatively new construction. 
When did this idea begin to take hold?  

Censorship did not focus on sexuality until relatively late in history. 
Obscenity law, which was an invention of the 19th century, grew out 
of a concern for youthful sexuality, specifically masturbation. You 
had all these appallingly cruel anti-masturbation devices and 
machines that were literally attached to children and adolescents at 
night to prevent the practice. It was made into a great taboo. 
Generations of children really did suffer all kinds of physical and 
mental harms from this repression of a natural impulse.  

Obscenity laws were an outgrowth of this need to control the 
vulnerable child. It wasn't until after an evolution of 100 years, 
during which all kinds of literary and artistic works were literally 
burned, that we began to recognize the need for a more liberal 
standard for adults with regard to obscenity.  

Do children and adolescents have the right to free speech?  

In theory, they do. The case in which the Supreme Court declared 
that most clearly was in 1969, when students were given the right to 
wear black armbands. But that had nothing to do with sex; it was 
about politics. In the last 30 years, even for nonsexual expression, 
the court has backed away from protecting students' right to free 
speech.  

Even back in the '60s and '70s, if the content was sexual, the courts 
had a different standard. The year before the black armband case, 
the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a candy store owner who 
sold a girlie magazine to a 16-year-old under the argument that it 
presented "harm to minors."  

The Supreme Court said that even though there is no documented 
harm to children from exposure to a nudie magazine, it is essential 
that the message of disapproval be conveyed.  

When you get right down to it, it's more of a moral or ideological, or 
even symbolic, argument. And what you end up with -- whether it's 
the Communications Decency Act or Internet filters or the V-chip -- 
are standards that are indecipherable. Even in the area of 
pornography, which most people would probably agree is not 
edifying for children, there is no evidence that occasional exposure 
will do them any actual harm.  

In the book you talk a lot about the fallacy of the "harm to minors" 
argument. Has anyone ever proven that exposure to sexual or 
violent content harms minors?  

In the area of sexual material, there have been almost no studies on 
minors. The studies done in the '70s by Andrea Dworkin and others 
dealt with college students. But nothing has been done with respect 
to [younger] kids.  

In the area of violence, there have been about 200 studies. The 
psychologists who support these studies claim that it has been 
proven: Exposure to violence hurts children.  

There are many things that psychology studies can show us, but the 
effect of media violence is not one of them. There is no agreement 
on what we mean by media violence. There is no agreement about 
harm. Is it an answer on a response survey? Is it behavior traced 
over time? Is it self-reported? Is it aggression? Is it violence? Is it 
fear?  

Even if you believe that social science can tell us something about 
this very complicated area of human experience, when you look at 
the actual studies, they haven't done so. There are all sorts of 
problems with methodologies, and then there is shocking 
manipulation of statistics. You see a lot of alarming, self-serving 
assertions.  

In terms of methodology, the studies that I think are the most 
compelling are the ones in which researchers ask young adults what 
media content they remember seeing as a child -- either sexual or 
violent -- that had a harmful or traumatic or disturbing effect. In the 
category of violence, you get answers like "Little House on the 
Prairie" and "The Wizard of Oz." It wasn't what you would expect.  

With so much controversy in the social sciences as to whether 
exposure to violent or sexual content causes harm to minors, why is 
it that political leaders -- on the left and the right -- continue to 
assume that the link has been proven?  

I was on a media panel a couple of weeks ago, and one of the 
panelists was a representative of the American Medical Association. 
A couple of months ago, the AMA joined with the American 
Psychological Association and signed on to this very dubious 
statement that claimed that the link between media violence and 
harm to minors had been proven.  

This panelist was very frank: He said, "We signed on to that 
statement as a political decision. There were things we needed from 
Senator Brownback, and from Senator Lieberman, and this seemed 
like a reasonable trade-off."  

People like Lieberman and Brownback may be truly offended by 
some media content. But they are remarkably vague about what, 
exactly, it is that offends them. If you ask them about a particular 
movie, "Bonnie and Clyde," say, or "Saving Private Ryan," they all 
say, "Well, that's OK. I'm talking about bad violence." When it 
comes to artists like Marilyn Manson, or heavy-metal music, these 
things simply offend them, and they want to believe there is 
scientific evidence to back up the notion that these things are 
harmful.  

Are we giving children the tools that they need to live in a 
democracy as adults when we deprive them of access to ideas that 
may be controversial? Are there other ways to deal with 
controversial ideas and media literacy that don't involve 
censorship?  

Media literacy education is a movement that has existed in the 
United States for about 20 or 30 years. We need a national initiative 
to bring media literacy into the curriculum. It's far more advanced in 
other countries -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.  

There are many different theories of how media literacy education 
should work. Some people who buy into the theory that media 
violence causes harm nevertheless advocate media literacy, as 
opposed to censorship, as a way to teach kids to identify what are 
exaggerated or clearly fantastic messages about violence and 
aggression or gender relations, to talk about the way cartoons are 
produced and how different special effects are produced and to put 
this in the context of their own lives.  

But there are other approaches to media literacy education that are 
less specifically based on teaching kids to be nonviolent, and more 
focused on teaching kids to understand how media is created, so 
that they can be savvy about the commercials they see and the way 
that the ads manipulate viewers.  

And some media education puts camcorders and tape recorders and 
cameras into the hands of kids and gets them to become journalists 
and artists and to confront some of these issues about how you 
create a media message and what it represents. This helps them to 
be more critical about the music they are listening to and the TV 
shows they are watching.  

If we could take some of this money that is going to pay Justice 
Department lawyers to defend this endless stream of child Internet 
protection laws, and use it to fund educational programs for actual 
children, I think it would be much more beneficial to our kids.  


Copyright 2001 Salon.com





 

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