2. CENSORING KIDS: CRACKING DOWN ON YOUTH CULTURE DOESN'T PROTECT KIDS

In May 1999, shortly after the Littleton, Colorado, murders, a North Carolina high-school student typed the words "The end is near" on a computer screen as a joke about millennial madness. Another student saw the message, called it a threat, and the school agreed. The boy was expelled for a year, then arrested. After three nights in jail, he was found guilty in state court. His original 45-day jail sentence was suspended, but he was penalized with 18 months of probation and 48 hours of community service. A 13year-old student in Texas fulfilled an assignment to write a "scary story." His story mentioned the shooting of real people. He was arrested and jailed for six days." In the Denver area, schools banned black trench coats, because the Columbine shooters and their friends were known to wear them. These excessive sentences and overreactions to teenagers' behavior not only violate the Constitutional rights of minors, they also contribute to kids' disaffection from school and the law. As child protection, they are useless, and may even be counterproductive.

In the late 19th century Anthony Comstock, chief special agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, pored over innumerable moral "traps for the young" that were a staple of middle-class households-half-dime novels, "story papers" and even the daily newspapers. The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children "kept a watchful eye upon the so-called Museums of the City," whose advertisements were "like magnets to curious children." According to one society report, a play featuring "depravity, stabbing, shooting, and blood-shedding" so traumatized a 10-year-old girl that she was found "wander[ing] aimlessly along Eighth Avenue as if incapable of ridding herself of the dread impressions that had filled her young mind." In a 1914 issue of The Atlantic, Agnes Repellier, a popular conservative essayist, inveighed against the film and publishing industries "coining money" by creating a generation sophisticated in sin. She may have been the first essayist to propose a governmentally run rating system, asking "the authorities" to bar minors "from all shows dealing with prostitution. ", (Today that category would include films like Pretty Woman and Trading Places.) In the 1920s and '30s, jazz came under attack, in the '50s, comic books were regulated, and in the 1960s, rock and roll was decried as a source of the evil that produced everything from premarital sex to resistance to the Vietnam war.

Today, these examples seem prudish, quaint, or simply wrong. What is outrageous in one era is ho-hum in another. But the generation gap has been around for at least two centuries. Since there has been anything resembling youth culture, adults have been exercised about its forms of expression. Frank Sinatra called Elvis Presley's music "the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear," and "the martial music of every... delinquent on the face of the earth." Today's generation of parents blamed heavy metal and rap music for young people's suicide and alienation in the 1980s; video games, Internet chat rooms, raves and other aspects of youth culture have all come under fire in the '90s. As technology gallops forward, with kids confidently at the reins, adult technophobia has become outrage. Adults often attempt to censor, not only what kids see and hear, but increasingly, what they say and create.

Advocates of censorship say that shielding children from certain words and images protects them. In fact, it can endanger them. For instance, Internet filtering software installed in the computers of New York City's public schools has blocked students' access to Web sites about breast cancer, child labor, anorexia and safe sex. High-school students cannot call up information about diabetes among black and Hispanic teens because the relevant sites mention erectile dysfunction." Such "protection" will only diminish kids' ability to keep themselves healthy and to participate intelligently in a complex world.

A student of Henry Jenkins at MIT who had been a goth for many years described what that identity, with its black clothes and taste for macabre music, meant to her. "In high school, before there was even the label goth, some of the disenfranchised youth started to hang out together to give ourselves a safe place to be depressed.

People want a safe space to explore the more depressing aspects of the world they live in. They don't want to feel guilty for not being happy all the time, they don't want to be told to get on Prozac, and they don't want to force themselves to put on masks for the benefit of the people around them."' The journal of Columbine shooter Eric Harris opened with the sentence: "I hate the fucking world." He also hated, among numerous other people and things, slow drivers in the fast lane, the WB network, Tiger Woods, and, if his suicide is a clue, himself. Did The Cure or Nine Inch Nails make those goths depressed? Did a neo-Nazi Web site teach Harris to hate everybody? Will prohibiting sales of CDs or blocking Internet sites to minors cheer up unhappy kids, or turn a boy like Eric Harris into a peacemaker? "When people want to censor material that they find vile or violent or disturbing, it's as if they think all the emotions that give rise to the interest in [those materials] will go away," said David Sanjek, director of the BMI Archives and a former educator. A lot of what attracts kids to horror movies or hostile lyrics, he said, is "trying to deal with issues of power" central to growing up and making it in school. "A child isn't going to give up his desire to destroy what has power over him if you don't let him go see a Freddy Krueger movie," Sanjek added.

A rap song about a murder is not a murder, a heavy metal song about suicide is not self-annihilation. The cross-dressing Marilyn Manson is not a seducer. When he snarls at the Church, he's not burning a cross. As MIT's Henry Jenkins told Congress, kids know that pop culture performers are putting on an act, playing a part-a part that offers a sublimated outlet for the audience's anger at authority or ambivalence about sexuality or organized religion. Similarly, no killing is going on in the killing rooms of Doom. The video game instead gives kids a play space to work out fantasies of destruction without destroying anything but pixels on a screen.

In more literal ways, video games can be therapeutic. Psychologists have taken advantage of the state of "relaxed alertness" induced by games to treat attention deficit disorder, depression and anxiety" and to rehabilitate people with brain injuries." And they're educational. Video games hone logic and coordination skills. Players commonly achieve the highly pleasurable combination of deep concentration and intellectual mastery called "flow." That, plus the motivation to win, puts players in an optimal frame of mind for learning-anything from the Highway Code for drivers" to safe-sex negotiation." In fact, video gaming is positively associated with higher IQs: Kids with higher scores play video games more."

Prohibition turned out to be one of the biggest social-policy mistakes of the 20th century. The popular demand for liquor created a booming black market. This gave the burgeoning American Mafia a leg up in business, created a wave of violent crime and made every social drinker a criminal. Especially because the evidence is so weak that violent content in the media presents a danger to kids, crackdowns on access may do children more harm than good. Do we really want them to have to break the law to see a movie with violent content like a classic John Wayne movie or Schindler's List? Some critics have suggested that such enforcement might only fuel the trade in fake identification, and other forms of subterfuge. It could also backfire in another way. Said one 14-year-old interviewed by The New York Times, "If you put more restrictions on [a movie], kids will just want to go even more."

"Minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected material to them," observed the Supreme Court in 1957. This is still true." Whatever you think of what kids are watching, listening to or saying, they have a Constitutional right to it. And curtailing anyone's rights threatens everyone's rights.