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

• Author: Grossberg, Michael

Not In Front of the Children, "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, Marjorie Heins, New York: Hill and Wang, 2001, 402 pages.

Marjorie Heins spent much of her career as a lawyer battling censorship with the American Civil Liberties Union. Today, she continues the fight as Director of the Free Expression Policy Project of the National Coalition Against Censorship. In an effort to understand the people who work to constrict the free flow of information, she stepped out of the trenches and into the library to do some research. Not In Front of the Children is the result. In it, Heins analyzes what she argues are the unexamined assumptions that support one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of censors: the claim that certain kinds of information must be banned to protect children from harm. She does so by chronicling the persistent power of this assumption. From Plato to Tipper Gore, censors have used child protection to legitimate bans on books, plays, music, scientific reference works, movies, comic books, and now Web sites. Despite its venerable past, Heins challenges the logic and utility of the "harmful to minors" censorship standard. Though she acknowledges the state's legitimate responsibility to protect the physical and psychological well-being of its youngest citizens, Heins contends that now, as in the past, little evidence can be marshaled to support the assumption that indecent, violent, or other proscribed material harm children in any significant way. Consequently, she concludes that the costs of censorship in the name of child protection far outweigh any demonstrable benefits, and it must therefore be abandoned.

Not In Front of the Children is an engaged and engaging brief against censorship and for the informational rights of children and adults. Heins develops her argument chronologically. The chapters proceed through time, documenting the persistent use of the harmful to minors standard as a tool of censorship. She attributes the first use of the tactic to Plato, who argued that the young could not differentiate worthwhile from erroneous information and thus had to be given only virtuous materials. She then recounts the consistent appeal of the argument ever since by highlighting key events in the history of censorship and their links to child protection. Building on the work of social and cultural historians, she explains that a new ideal of childhood emerged in Western Europe and North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new view of children revolved around the notion that children were distinct individuals, and childhood should be a special, nurturing time. Childhood innocence in particular came to dominate views of the young. As a result, child protection took on a new meaning and importance, which paved the way for it to become a policy trump card always available to those who would restrict the free flow of information.

These developments were critical, Heins argues, because the new views and anxieties about children coincided with heightened concern about obscenity. Efforts by British and American legal authorities to devise rules regulating obscene materials began in the mid-nineteenth century with the English Hicklin rule, which banned material deemed likely to deprave and corrupt impressionable minds. Heins traces the tortuous legal path that resulted from the inherent difficulties of finding a broadly acceptable rationale for censoring...