Violence as Obscenity: Limiting the Media's First Amendment Protection.

• Author: Bok, Sissela Ann

By Kevin W. Saunders. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 1996. Pp. viii, 246. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $17.95.

In his book, Violence as Obscenity, Professor Kevin Saunders(1) has fashioned an ingenious and provocative thought experiment regarding options for state regulation of media violence. He proposes to fit both sexual and violent material deemed unacceptable under the same heading of obscenity. Like "sufficiently explicit and offensive sexual material," certain expressions of media violence should be unprotected by the first Amendment. Violence and sex, he holds, should be evaluated according to the same criteria: "Violence is at least as obscene as sex. If sexual images may go sufficiently beyond community standards for candor and offensiveness, and hence be unprotected, there is no reason why the same should not be true of violence" (p. 3).

In this review, I first consider Saunders's discussion of the available empirical evidence regarding the risks posed by media violence in the context of the public debate on this subject. I then take up his arguments supporting the conclusion that violent material, when sufficiently offensive, should no longer be protected by the First Amendment. Finally, I explain why I find this conclusion to be doubly unpersuasive: both unwise in principle and unworkable in practice.

Saunders's analysis of the problems presented by media violence represents an important contribution to the growing debate the world over about the effects of such violence and about how societies might best respond. Can we protect against the unprecedented amounts, variety, and availability of media violence made possible by today's technologies without infringing on the freedom of speech? In America, because of the central role of the First Amendment and its guarantee of free speech, the debate often takes the form of a sharply felt dilemma. Polls consistently show that about four-fifths of Americans are troubled by present levels of media violence, believing it to exert a deleterious influence on the young and to contribute to societal violence.(2) At the same time, most people are not only exceedingly wary with respect to greater government controls but are also convinced that these controls will not work.(3) Many in the public feel torn, therefore, between what they see as legitimate dismay over what entertainment violence is doing to our society and equally legitimate dismay over the thought of allowing censorship in response.

First Amendment scholars have offered little discussion of problems related to media violence until the past decade, compared to their close attention to the challenges that pornography and hate speech pose to free speech. Those who produce and distribute violent films and television programs routinely invoke the First Amendment as a shield against would-be censors, governmental or otherwise; by contrast, most legal scholars have long focused primarily on the print media and on political speech in the United States.(4) Only in the past decade have Saunders and other legal scholars devoted the attention to these questions that they so clearly merit.(5)

The first two chapters of Violence as Obscenity deal with the public debate over media violence and the social science research on possible effects of exposure to the violence in television programs, interactive games, and the internet. Saunders points out that professional groups, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, have surveyed the research and arrived at the conclusion that heavy exposure to television...