How Not to Protect Children

by Joan Kennedy Taylor



The second inauguration of President Clinton proved

(if it needed proving) that a surefire source of

political support is declaring that your policies

will benefit children.  Often the biggest cheers are

for ways of controlling the lives of children. 

Sometimes these policies are directed only at

young people — school uniforms, curfews. 

President Clinton has supported both of these

ideas, and a Labor M.P. in England proposed "a

nationwide curfew on the young" in 1996, according

to an article by Jan Clifford Lester published by

the Libertarian Alliance.

Sometimes the policies are thinly disguised attempts

to regulate the behavior of adults in the name of

protecting "children."  Consider the emotional

passion with which arguments for drug legalization

are rejected, for instance, on the grounds that even

allowing medical use of presently illicit drugs

will end in approving it for the young.  (TV shows

ask, "How do you explain the evils of marijuana to

your children when you smoked it yourself in the

past?")

But the main target seems to be adult speech —

including commercial speech, hate speech, violent

speech, and sexual speech — in the name of

controlling what will be available to children.

We have long had a tradition of forbidding the sale of

certain products to children, notably tobacco and

alcohol.  But we are now scrutinizing the

advertisements for these products.  Questions about

the "Joe Camel" ads for Camel cigarettes grew so

intense that the campaign was withdrawn by the

manufacturers.  A decision by the liquor industry

to end its voluntary policy against advertising on

television was denounced by both President Clinton

and Trent Lott saying, reported The New York

Times, "their advertising would be a bad influence

on children."  What seems to be going on is a

fight for advertising turf between the hard liquor

industry and the beer and wine industry, but

child-protection has become the overriding issue. 

The Federal Trade Commission has issued subpoenas

to the Stroh Brewery Company and Seagram Americas

asking them to explain whether or not their ads

are aimed at underage people.  Bills have been

introduced in Congress to forbid hard liquor

advertising on TV and to force beer and wine ads

into late-night time slots.  Meanwhile, the major

networks are refusing to accept liquor ads.

The furor about children viewing violence led the

Attorney General of the United States to say (with

astonishing disregard for the first amendment) that

if the television industry didn't do something about

the violent content of television programs, the

government would.  We have long had ratings for

movies.  As a result of government pressure, now we

have them for television programs, and we have

v-chips in all new sets that can screen out

programs, using these ratings.  We have long had FCC

rules that banish sexier programs to late hours on

radio and television when children are supposedly

not awake.  Now there are 

proposals to similarly banish ads for "grown-up"

products.  We have long banned "indecent" language

(to say nothing of content) on radio and

television.  Now people want the same kind of

controls on the Internet.

The feeling that there is just too much of the kind of

speech we don't want people to like out there is not

new, but the extreme emphasis on children is.  By

the mid-seventies, American intellectuals, who had

previously unanimously rallied to defend sexually

explicit passages in books like Ulysses and Lady

Chatterley's Lover found themselves split over the

rights of the creators of Hustler and "Deep

Throat."  Part of the issue was the wide

circulation of the magazine and movie, and the

lower-class audience at which they seemed to be

aimed.

There is an implied theory of free expression here. 

Is it important because the function of government

is to protect rights; and freedom of speech, the

press, and religion are the most consistently

supported

rights in the American Bill of Rights?  Or do we

allow free expression, tolerate it, because its

exercise is beneficial for society?  In that case,

of course, an argument that society needs some

particular expression suppressed will have weight. 

It may even outweigh individual rights.  Our

constitutional history tells us that both

arguments have been invoked in landmark decisions,

but the history of the law dealing with explicit

sexual expression has always been a battle between

both points of view.  Art is good.  Obscenity

(whatever that is decided to be) is bad.  Smut for

personal gain (whether financial or seductive) is

suspect: in 1968, a man named Ralph Ginzburg went

to jail for five years because he advertised for

some materials he published as if they might be

obscene, even though the Court agreed they were not.

Libertarians see a society made up of individuals with

rights.  But many people today seem to see a society

whose media is so pervasive and whose standards are

so fragmented that children have to be protected

against knowing about it too soon — by government

repression, if necessary, even if that curtails the

rights of adults.  We feel out of control.  We want

the impossible: a child-proof world.

An excerpt from Jon Katz's book, Virtuous Reality, was

run as an article, "Old Media, New Media and a

Middle Way," in the Arts & Leisure section of The

New York Times on Sunday, January 19. It began, "The

1990's are the decade of the Mediaphobe....A nation

bitterly

divided on an array of issues from gun control to

Medicaid can unite on this: new media, popular

culture, modern information technology — all of it

endangers our young, corrodes our civic sphere,

decivilizes us all."  The excerpt goes on to

suggest how what Katz dubs a Sensible Person

should guide children through this confusing

world.  First, provide young children with

computers, beginning with games and CD-ROMs and

going on to supervised Internet access, perhaps

even using a blocking service, but then

withdrawing as children get older, so that by the

time they are adolescents they are thoroughly

familiar with the Internet, and can use their

expertise to explore for themselves, even in

rebellion against adult conventions.  What about

pornography online?  "At times they may be exposed

to pornographic imagery or language.  But perhaps

it's time to start teaching children how to cope

with sexually explicit imagery rather than

persisting in the fiction that we can make it

evaporate."

Realistic and sensible suggestions, but the Mediaphobe

may prefer to remain angry and confused.  So today,

legislators voting for the Communications Decency

Act to regulate the Internet or the Child

Pornography Prevention Act (which criminalizes

depictions of sexual activity on the part of minors

even if no actual children were used in their

production) assume that everyone will think they

arethe good guys, because they are helping society

to protect children.  And the links of such speech

with the activities of children are more and more

tenuous, and the harms to children need less and

less to be proved.

Anyone who protests such protection must be a bad guy. 

Legislatures and the courts now often seem to take

it for granted that sexually explicit materials are

by definition "harmful to minors" and no further

finding of fact is required — often not even a

finding that

minors are in fact accessing the material.  For

instance, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in

upholding a law requiring that non-obscene

sexually explicit tabloids could not be sold in

newsracks unless they had 24-hour monitors, saw no

need for a legislative finding that minors were

actually patronizing such newsracks.  Not

coincidentally, newsracks are the main source of

distribution of the tabloids in question.

Another case that is now being appealed to the Supreme

Court sought an injunction against another

economically punitive law requiring cable channels

"primarily dedicated to sexually-oriented

programming" to scramble both audio and video

signals so that there could be no signal bleed to

non-subscribers.  A three-judge panel has upheld the

law in the name of protecting minors, even though

two-thirds of American

households contain no minors, and even though the

handful of cable channels involved can and will

scramble the signals to those households that

request it, by providing a free "lock box" to shut

out the signals to any non-subscriber who asks. 

In this case too, the cable channels involved will

either be dropped by the cable companies that now

offer them to subscribers or will be banished to

"safe harbor" hours after 10 p.m. instead of being

available throughout the day as they are now.

The Communications Decency Act, now being appealed to

the Supreme Court, made transmission of "indecent"

materials to minors a federal offense, and was found

by a Philadelphia court to be unconstitutional

because it effectively criminalized speech between

adults that is perfectly legal.  The court found

that present

technology does not provide a way to ascertain with

any certainty whether one is communicating with a

minor or not.  Nothing daunted, New York State

passed a law last November criminalizing material on

the Internet that is "harmful to minors," defined as

"patently offensive" stuff that "appeals to the

prurient interest of minors" and "lacks social value

for minors."  The ACLU, which has asked for a

permanent injunction against the law, says that

explicit safer sex information would be included

in that definition, even though it clearly has

social value for teenagers.

What all these instances add up to is that "protecting

children" is a magic word that enables social

conservatives to receive unquestioning support for

laws and regulations that are putting people out of

business and would probably not be supported if

they clearly targeted adult speech.

But that may be coming.  The State of Virginia has

passed a law forbidding state employees from

accessing or storing, through state-owned or leased

computers or telephone networks, "sexually explicit

content" as defined in a previous law restricting

sales to

juveniles.  This law would not just keep clerks

from surfing the Internet — it affects university

professors, librarians, and researchers, who now

must get permission in writing from their "agency

heads" to view nudity (as in Renaissance

sculpture) or download files dealing with sexual

conduct.

Are we so fearful for our children that we are

becoming a nation of prudes?  Michael Lewis in his

New York Times column, "The Capitalist," said he

thinks that all of these phenomena are products of a

Depression mentality at work. "The culture is busy

creating moral restraints that one normally

associates with bear markets and unfortunate

times:  TV ratings, V-chips, school uniforms,

curfews, wars on drugs, family values."

    I would suggest rather that, as the members of the

Baby Boom generation face the difficulty of

parenting teenagers themselves, the group that was

once a symbol of social experimentation and

tolerance is taking the easy way of listening more

and more to voices that are

raised in favor of social repression.

A dangerous choice.  We seem to have forgotten how

restrictive traditional societies have been in

bringing up children.  A story in the New York Times

of December 28 interviewed Somali refugee women who

have been infibulated, "which involves sewing up

the genital lips to leave only a tiny hole for

passage of urine and menstrual blood."  Several

women interviewed by reporter Celia W. Dugger "all

said they would not have that extreme form of

cutting done to their daughters.  The damage to

their own lives was too great.  But they did

continue to want the tip of their daughters'

clitorises clipped off.

"Halima Eidl, 20....still believes a milder form of the

cutting she endured is necessary so that Rashaida

[her 2 ½ year-old daughter] does not later run off

with boys and have babies before marriage.  She was

disappointed Medicaid refused to cover the

procedure.  She does not know how she will pay for

the tickets to take Rashaida to Africa, but she

will try to find a way."

Few Baby Boomers would consider physically crippling

their children in such a way in order to ensure that

they conform to society's mores and are protected

from social evils.  But the moves to control and

curb the information explosions that surround us are

suggestions to mentally cripple our children, for

similar reasons.  It has always been a frightening

world.  But we must find ways to teach our

youngsters to fly out there.





Letter to the Editor

Imaging his "freetopia," R. Hammer asks, perhaps

seriously, "Will children be sold?" [#59]

This question itself offends the liberty of children. 

New-borns soon imprint on one or more care-givers,

especially if the baby is breast-fed.  To sell a

human, after it has imprinted on some particular

adult(s), is inhumane slavery.

Let imagineers debate instead about selling priority

to adopt a fetus before birth.  Or better yet,

selling a frozen embryo for implanting in a uterus.

Tortuga Bi Liberty

Berkeley, CA



[editor's note: Tortuga Bi Liberty raises a point that

the debate on Family Structure will need to take

into account.  In fact, our courts would consider

his suggestion of selling the right to adopt as

illegal, although private adoptions are now allowed

to be arranged in which the expenses of the birth

are covered.  But since Hammer asked his question in

the context of orphanages, I assumed he was

referring to something similar to the nineteenth-

century practice of apprenticing poor children,

which was part of a practice called "bidding out the

poor" in rural America, in which county officials

held an auction to dispose of the community's poor —

the lowest, not the highest bid won.  That is, in a

practice similar to that of indenturing servants,

the person who asked for the lowest amount of money

from officials to house and feed specific poor

people in return got their services for as long as

they paid the county the fee.  Poor

children were apprenticed in a similar manner, but

when they came of age, they were allowed to try to

seek jobs independently, and presumably, those to

whom they were apprenticed had taught them a

trade.  In this sense, they were in fact "sold,"

or rather, rented out for a finite period of time.]





Update

Resources for Independent Thinking (RIT) is offering

in its new catalog three tapes of talks on

libertarian feminist subjects.  They are:

"Moses and Lillian Harman: Radical Lightbearers," a

talk by Sharon Presley.  Moses Harman and his

daughter Lillian braved the Comstock laws to publish

Lucifer: the Lightbearer, a radical journal

promoting anarchism, feminism, free love and free

thought.

90 min./1 cassette  $10.00

"Loving Freedom: the Anarchist Life of Voltairine de

Cleyre," a talk by Sharon Presley.  A passionate

writer, speaker, and poet, Voltairine was

contemporary of Emma Goldman and a well-known

anarchist feminist and freethought advocate.

95 min./2 cassettes  $12.00

"What You Can Do About Sexual Harassment In the

Workplace When You Don't Want to Call the Cops," a

talk by Joan Kennedy Taylor.  Using strategies

gleaned from managers, union officials, and workers,

primarily in jobs that are non-traditional for

women, topics include: important facts of male group

culture, the pluses and minuses of confrontation,

steps to forestall harassment before it occurs, and

how to get a network of support when you are treated

unfairly.

90 min./1 cassette  $10.00

Sharon Presley, who is ALF's West Coast Coordinator

and also the head of RIT, is a social psychologist

whose specialties are obedience and resistance to

authority and gender research.  Mentored by Stanley

Milgram, author of the classic study, Obedience to

Authority, her research has included political

resisters to authority, women resisters, and

Mormon feminists.  Her most recent writings on

critical thinking about authority have appeared in

Free Inquiry, Liberty, and Independent Thinking

Review.  Reader of ALF News and Critical Thinking

Review have also read her reports on gender

studies, including "Testing Carol Gilligan's

Theory," excerpts from a paper by Sharon and Ofer

Zur reporting on a joint research project

involving 416 college students that failed to find

support for Gilligan's claim that women and men

have different moral orientations [ALF News #36,

Fall 1990].  Sharon is currently completing work

on an anthology of Voltairine de Cleyre's writings

(entitled Loving Freedom, like her RIT talk) and

is beginning a book on sex, gender, and biology.

RIT is also selling a set of the following three taped

lectures that Sharon gave last year on gender

differences, collectively called "Myths of Gender,"

a five-cassette set that sells for $32.

"Are Men and Women Really Different Species?: Myths v.

Realities about Gender."  Are males better at math? 

Are females better at verbal abilities? Are women

more emotionally unstable than men?  Are women

morally superior?  Are men more violent?  Do men and

women have different styles of moral judgment?  What

the real differences are and are not, based on

actual social science gender-comparison research.

120 min./ 2 cassettes  $12.00

"Does Testosterone Make Men Macho?: Sex, Gender, &

Biology, Part I."  Does testosterone make males more

aggressive?  Does estrogen make females more

nurturing?  How to critically evaluate research on

the influence of sex hormones on behavior:

principles to keep in mind when reading popular

reports of gender research, and a critique of the

book, Brain Sex.

90 min./1 cassette  $10

"Do Women and Men Have Different Brains?: Sex, Gender,

& Biology, Part II."  Are there differences in brain

structure that lead to differences in behavior?  The

heavy politicization of this research is discussed,

as well as the logical and methodological problems

of gender-related brain research.

90 min./ 1 cassette  $10 

For more information, call Resources for Independent

Thinking, (510) 601-9450, or send email to

rit@well.com.





Karen Michalson (who was the subject of an interview

in ALF News # 57) and her rock band, Point of Ares,

have done very well in the past year.  Their first

CD album, Enemy Glory,  was released in October by

Arula Records.  Their press release calls it "A

haunting, violent, mythical rock epic based on

bassist-vocalist Karen Michalson's fantasy novel." 

It has been receiving airplay throughout the

northeast and getting attention nationally, and one

of its numbers, "Slouching Towards Chaos," was

nominated by the Worcester Phoenix as one of the 10

best singles of 1996. Also, according to Karen, the

album has been

solicited by Latvian radio.  "According to the

Latvian DJ who approached me," she writes, "A DJ

in Los Angeles sent him two of our songs on

cassette, and they are generating much enthusiasm

over there, so he would like the entire album to

play cuts from over the next year.  (I knew we

were getting some airplay out in California but I

had no idea our stuff was getting passed around

the world.)  Freedom of choice and expression! 

Rock On!"

For those who want more information, Point of Ares has

a home page:

http://www.ultranet.com/ares