From Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, from Internet filters to the v-chip, censorship exercised on behalf of children and adolescents is often based on the assumption that they must be protected from "indecent" information that might harm their development -- whether in art, in literature, or on a Web site. But where does this assumption come from, and is it true?

In Not in Front of the Children, Marjorie Heins explores the fascinating history of "indecency" laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth. From Plato's argument for rigid censorship, through Victorian laws aimed at repressing libidinous thoughts, to contemporary battles over sex education in public schools and violence in the media, Heins guides us through what became, and remains, an ideological minefield. With fascinating examples drawn from around the globe, she suggests that the "harm to minors" argument rests on shaky foundations.

There is an urgent need for informed, dispassionate debate about the perceived conflict between the free-expression rights of young people and the widespread urge to shield them from expression that is considered harmful. Not in Front of the Children will spur this long-needed conversation.
 

	Marjorie Heins, director of the Free Expression Policy Project at the National Coalition Against Censorship, is the author, most recently, of Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America's Censorship Wars.
Author

Reviews
"Not in Front of the Children is an indispensable resource for anyone curious about censorship designed to 'protect' young people, and an eloquent argument for more thoughtful dialogue about helping kids grow up without stifling their spirit."
 – Judy Blume

"In recent years the rights of young people have come under siege from the left and the right. Their civil liberties are systematically compromised, eroded, and denied in the name of public safety and the so-called best interests of the child. Heins examines the long history of 'protecting' children from 'indecency.' Her analysis exposes hidden political agendas, ideological underpinnings, and fallacious logic. In challenging our most basic assumptions about children, Heins breaks new ground, facilitating a dialogue that's long overdue. Scholars, educators, civil libertarians, legislators, students, and young people and their advocates will find this an invaluable resource."
 – Donna Gaines, author of Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids

"Marjorie Hein's jewel of a book tells us where the American obsession with sex has been, where it is now, and where she thinks it will be tomorrow. Wonderfully written, by a fine scholar who has led the battle against censorship, it's a must-read for anyone who wants to understand today's American cultural scene. Heins is one of our most imprisoned and informed First Amendment activists, and here she gives us a ringside seat at the cultural wars."
 – Martin Garbus, author of Tough Talk

"The tangled issues regarding censorship on behalf of children are unsnarled in Marjorie Heins's Not in Front of the Children. Once exposed to her truly incisive treatment, readers will never again consider these matters in the same old ways."
 – Jib Fowles, author of Why Viewers Watch and The Case for Television Violence

“Heins argues potently that the age-old idea of protecting children from “corrupting” influences, which can be traced at least as far back as Plato’s Republic, has reached dangerous proportions in the U.S. . . . Heins’s historical argument makes an important contribution to the literature of civil liberties and child psychology.”
 – Publishers Weekly

“A well-researched and thoughtful review of the history of censorship of ‘indecent’ materials. ... Heins dissects the arguments made over the centuries by those claiming that books, film, radio, and the Internet can cause ‘harm to minors.’ ... a well-reasoned argument that censorship in the name of children harms them more than it helps.”
 – Library Journal

“A timely appeal to our better judgment.  Heins traces the history of our illusions about juvenile innocence, as well as our endeavors to preserve that myth through censorship. ... She dissects the effort to restrict material ‘harmful to minors,’ which has become the favorite conservative cause of moderate politicians. ... Indecency, the moral concept disguised by this bogus concept of harmfulness, is itself disparate, subtle, and subjective.”
 – Mother Jones

Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Not in Front of the Children
by Marjorie Heins
Published by Hill and Wang; May 2001; $30.00US/$47.00CAN; 0-374-17545-4
Copyright © 2001 Marjorie Heins

From Plato to Computers

A young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.

This reliance, by judges sworn to uphold the First Amendment, on the pedagogical advice of Plato was remarkable. For whatever the Greek philosopher's literary or intellectual virtues, his doctrine of rigid censorship was about as hostile to our modern ideas of free expression as one can imagine. In the Republic, his prescription for an ideal state, Plato explained that writers must be censored because they give "an erroneous representation" of gods and heroes; indeed, even if their tales of divine and heroic misdeeds were true, they "ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons." Plato likewise urged the suppression of "indecency" in sculpture and "the other creative arts" and of all music that did not promote temperance and military courage.

Judicial adoption of Plato's indoctrination theory was in a sense the logical culmination of a decade in which all branches and levels of American government were busy censoring youth. The same year as Boring, courts in other states also upheld punishments imposed by local school boards -- in Missouri, of a creative writing teacher who failed to purge her students' stories of profane language; in Colorado, of a history teacher who showed his class a celebrated film by Bernardo Bertolucci, 1900, which contained moments of nudity, violence, and implicit sex. Indeed, censorship of public school curriculum materials and library books had become so common in the United States by the 1990s that hardly any work was immune from challenge. Among the more frequent targets were Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Toni Morrison's Beloved; John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

In Congress, meanwhile, the zeal to protect youth was manifested in a series of laws restricting "indecency" on television and the Internet and censoring sex education. As part of its massive 1996 welfare reform, Congress appropriated $250 million for local sex ed programs -- but only if they preached abstinence until marriage and taught that any "sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects." Under this "abstinence till marriage" curriculum, potentially lifesaving information on safer sex and contraception was suppressed, on the theory that even learning about such subjects would lead youngsters to believe that sexual activity was encouraged.

Censorship in the name of child protection was not always solemn or health-threatening, however; sometimes it was simply comic. In 1996, the Bad Frog Brewery applied to the New York State Liquor Authority for permission to market its designer beer, with a label that featured "a frog with the second of its four unwebbed 'fingers' extended in a manner evocative of a well known human gesture of insult." The Liquor Authority rejected Bad Frog's application, largely because it felt the label could have "adverse effects" on "children of tender age." A federal trial judge agreed that the Authority had a legitimate interest in "protecting children" from "profane" advertising.

This exercise in government-enforced etiquette was eventually reversed, but not because the appellate judges questioned the underlying assumption that minors would be harmed by seeing the frog's crude gesture on a grocery label. To the contrary, the judges recited what had by then become a truism in U.S. constitutional law -- that states have "a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors," an interest that includes shielding them from "the influence of literature that is not obscene by adult standards." The only reason for a First Amendment violation in the Bad Frog case, according to the appellate court, was that given "the wide currency of vulgar displays throughout contemporary society, including comic books targeted directly at children," the Liquor Authority's ban amounted to removing only a few insignificant "grains of offensive sand from a beach of vulgarity." In essence, it appeared, New York's problem was that it had not taken more extensive steps to censor advertising and other expression in the interest of protecting youth.

The Bad Frog judges never indicated why they thought exposure to the beer label would be psychologically harmful. But clearly they were acting on widely shared beliefs about harm to minors from art, literature, advertising, and other forms of communication. The assumption was that even if coarse entertainment or provocative materials are tolerable for adults, children and adolescents either are too fragile to handle vulgarity, sex, and controversy or lack the intellectual freedom rights that the First Amendment grants adults -- or both.

Of course, the assumption that minors are harmed by reading, watching movies, or surfing the Internet is usually framed in terms of gratuitous violence or pornography, not controversial works of theater, silly beer labels, or novels by John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison. But terms like "pornography" and "gratuitous violence" are elastic, and if the underlying philosophy is one of protection through censorship, then it is only a matter of opinion whether gratuitous violence means Schindler's List or Terminator 2, whether safer-sex films that illustrate the unrolling of a condom are salutary or immoral, or whether Judy Blume novels that discuss masturbation or premarital sex are pornographic. Even if adults could agree, moreover, on what is truly inadvisable for young people, the rarely asked question remains, In what sense is it harmful? And does it justify censorship?

I became intrigued by these questions during my tenure as director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Arts Censorship Project (1991-98). Not only were children and teenagers the most frequent targets of censorship in these years, but they became the justification for restrictions that affected adults as well. Thus, we saw Internet rating and filtering installed on public library computers; stores refusing to carry popular music that contained warning labels; and laws prohibiting "indecency" on cable television. The 1996 Communications Decency Act, or CDA, was undoubtedly the most sweeping of these "child protection" initiatives that infringed on the free-speech rights of adults.

The CDA made it a crime to send a minor any "indecent" Internet communication or to "display in a manner available to minors" any online expression that "in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs." Because nearly everything on the Internet was available to any minor who had the equipment and knowledge to access it, the "display" provision of the CDA in essence criminalized "patently offensive" or "indecent" speech online. (The two terms -- developed in previous decades to describe speech deemed harmful to youth -- were usually considered synonymous.)

To address this dramatic problem of "overbreadth," the CDA provided a defense if online speakers took steps to identify and screen out minors from their e-mail listserves, discussion groups, chat rooms, or World Wide Web sites. But such screening was a near-impossible task: the vast majority of speakers and publishers in cyberspace did not have the technological or economic means to determine the ages of those who accessed their ideas. The CDA thus essentially purged from the Internet any sexually oriented expression that a federal prosecutor somewhere in the United States thought might be "indecent" or "patently offensive."

I was one of the lawyers in Reno v. ACLU, the constitutional challenge to the CDA. Our plaintiffs -- among them Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and the Queer Resources Directory -- wanted to persuade the courts that their communications, even if "indecent' or "patently offensive," had value for minors as well as adults. So, for example, the plaintiff Critical Path AIDS Project targeted urban teenagers for its online information on condoms and other safer-sex techniques. Another plaintiff, Stop Prisoner Rape, communicated graphic descriptions of violent sexual experiences to youngsters at risk of incarceration. The ACLU itself had a teen chat Web page that included a discussion of masturbation, inspired by President Clinton's firing of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders in 1994 because of her suggestion that sexuality education might straightforwardly address this common, safe, but still often shame-inducing activity.

Much of this evidence found its way into the judicial opinions in Reno striking down the CDA. Judge Dolores Sloviter, in the trial court, noted the possible application of the law to erotic sculptures on Hindu temples, the film Leaving Las Vegas, and Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize -- winning play, Angels in America. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the Supreme Court the following year, mentioned "serious discussion about birth control practices," homosexuality, prison rape, safer sex, artistic nudes, and "arguably the card catalogue of the Carnegie Library." The Supreme Court in Reno thus recognized for the first time that explicit, even "patently offensive," information and ideas about sex might be educational rather than harmful for minors.

But the recognition caused hardly a ripple in the political world. Within a month after the Supreme Court decision, the White House convened an "Online Summit" to explore alternative means of protecting kids in cyberspace, and a larger conference later that year featured colorful displays of the myriad software packages now available for blocking minors' access to "inappropriate" online content. Vice President Al Gore in a keynote speech equated the presumptive psychological harm of disapproved speech to poisons in the family medicine chest.

Inevitably, this touting of voluntary "parental empowerment" filtering software gave way to more coercive initiatives. Senator John McCain proposed legislation making Internet filters mandatory in schools and libraries that receive federal aid. In 1998, Congress passed "son of CDA" a "Child Online Protection Act" that again criminalized material deemed "harmful to minors" (a narrower legal standard than "indecency"). Campaigns against media violence also intensified: the 1996 CDA mandated television v-chips; Nassau County, New York, had already criminalized the sale to minors of trading cards depicting perpetrators of "heinous crimes"; and in 1999, the massacre at Colorado's Columbine High School by two disturbed teenagers sparked an orgy of media blaming.

The events that followed Reno v. ACLU, and the continued popularity of censorship designed to protect, shield, indoctrinate, or socialize young people, dramatized the durability and emotional power of the belief that minors are harmed by sexual expression depending upon one's values, by speech about violence, drugs, alcohol, suicide, religion, racism, or other troublesome themes. Unexamined assumptions continue to dominate this debate, with questionable consequences not only for the First Amendment freedoms of all of us but for the moral and intellectual development of youngsters themselves. In Not in Front of the Children, I explore the origin of these assumptions, trace the history of "harm to minors" censorship, and attempt to get beyond the emotionally charged but sometimes dubious rhetoric that surrounds it.

*End notes were omitted

Copyright © 2001 Marjorie Heins
 

You may also obtain a copy of  Not in Front of the Children at the National Coalition Against Censorship store or Amazon.com.