Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth

Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth Marjorie Heins. New York: Hill and Wang, 200i. ISBN 0-374-i7545-4. $30.00. Marjory Heins, an attorney with the ACLU and Director of the Free Expression Policy Project at the National Coalition Against Censorship, has written this book to investigate whether free speech, including the right to read, view, hear, and think about the expression of others, can cause direct harm. By "harm" she means harm to personal privacy, to a fair trial, to physical safety, to the right to work, study, or vote. The specific question she raises is "whether any similar, directly identifiable harm can be traced to minors' access to sexual or other controversial information or ideas or whether the issue is really a more generalized ideological one-censorship in the interest of moral values and symbolism. "The investigation that follows is a condensed encyclopedia of the cultural and legal history of youth and censorship. The author advances her thesis with thorough detail. She begins with an enlightening history of the status of children and family relationships. From Plato (4th century B.C.E) to the 20th century, changes in infant health, the division of labor, and family structure have contributed markedly to the development of the nuclear family. The current concept of family and the expectations for children's behavior and sensibilities have not been the norm over the centuries and are in flux now.Given this historical background, the author stresses that in a society championing the rights of the individual, children must be understood as individuals, too. Laws pertaining to adults in their maturity may or may not apply to the malleable state of the young. A detailed case history of laws pertaining to censorship and minors in the United States and the United Kingdom follows. In fact, i06 pages of the book are footnotes. There are di[double dagger]culties inherent in analyzing this complex issue starting with the necessary definitions. Legally, there has been perennial di[double dagger]culty in defining "obscenity" and "harm to minors" that is beyond the givens of sexual content, violence, and hate speech. There has been further di[double dagger]culty in defining "children. " The issue of maturity and the variable maturity of individual children of the same age are acknowledged but undecided by the courts. Furthermore, the term "censorship" which is considered pejorative for adults, becomes altered in the case of children, especially the very young, when the meaning is related to sheltering, protecting, and even rearing and teaching.Heins discusses what e∂ects the di∂erent media have on children. This is not just a legal question and still needs to be addressed more extensively. The Greek dramatists themselves realized the special emotional impact of viewing scenes of violence by taking them o∂ the stage, making them literally "obscene," that is, out of the scene. The emotional impact of the sensory route by which an idea is communicated can change the impact of information. Reading about an event will not have the same impact as hearing it or seeing it.If a problem is solved by how it is viewed, then this book represents a decidedly legal or adversarial method of determining the "truth. " The scientific community has applied its methodology to determining the answer to similar questions for decades, for example, the impact of television violence on children. Results have been inconclusive, although studies have not been immune to political infiuences. …