Visit Youth Free Expression Network (YFEN) for more about our youth programs which include a Speaker's Bureau, Youth Advisory Board, Youth-written Op-Eds, and our annual Youth Film Contest.

 

The concept of youth as innocent beings is a relatively recent phenomenon. From the time of the ancient Greeks and for centuries afterward, children were associated with grossness and lewdness and considered only partially human, more of a financial asset than a vulnerable human being. Infanticide, abandonment and sales into brothels were their common fate.

In the 17th century, Puritanism began viewing children as carriers of Original Sin who must be controlled and indoctrinated into correct behavior, resulting in castration, clitoridectomy, chastity belts, penile rings, and straight jackets for thousands of children for the next 150 years. The Western world was caught up in a myth of childhood innocence.

Fast forward to present day, and it does not seem like much has changed at all. The myth that young people who are exposed to controversial or objectionable materials - from sexually descriptive literature to artworks with nudity to violence-laden films to textbooks on evolution - will act out what they read, see or hear still abounds today. Most of the censorship battles relating to young people play out in schools or libraries.

Sex education has always been a controversial censorship issue. On one hand, sex education in schools beyond abstinence-only preaching would equip young people with the information they need to have healthy and mature sexual relationships, but on the other hand, many fear that introducing young people to too much too soon may trigger their desire to have sex prematurely.

Such is the logic that some parents and educators use to justify banning award-winning literary and artistic works from schools. Books by Maya Angelou, Judy Blume, John Steinbeck and Mark Twain, among many others, frequently appear on the American Library Association’s lists of challenged and banned books. And classic artworks such as Michaelangelo’s David have been censored or banned in a number of schools. The fear, again, stems from the idea that when it comes to sex, children who are exposed to it will do it.

Similar concerns revolve around violent films, video games and music lyrics. Critics of such works argue that young people subjected to violence through these media are apt to mimic what they see, play and hear in the real world.

One other major issue with youth and censorship involves young people’s First Amendment rights in schools. Though the Supreme Court has stated that students in public schools do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” (see Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District), censorship cases still frequently arise when student writers school newspapers attempt to publish controversial articles against the school’s wishes. The students, eager to expand the journalism skills they have been taught, view such censorship as counter to their First Amendment rights, but the school districts view it as their duty as educators to protect other students from being exposed to such controversial subjects in school-sponsored publications.

Visit the following pages to see the latest record of NCAC's work:

art
media
literature
science
internet
education
entertainment

Also visit these new archive pages which feature a collection of links to articles, opinion pieces, reports and other resources we have collected over the past two years relating to student expression:

NEW: An Archive of Student Expression Incidents in 2007

NEW: An Archive of Student Expression Incidents in 2006  

 

Visit Youth Free Expression Network (YFEN) for more about our youth programs which include a Speaker's Bureau, Youth Advisory Board, Youth-written Op-Eds, and our annual Youth Film Contest.  

» NCAC Statement on Media Marketing Accountability Act The NCAC expresses its views on the Media Marketing Accountability Act, which aims to respond to concerns about violent or sexual content in entertainment by threatening entertainment companies whose programs and products are considered "inappropriate" for youth.

» Not In Front of the Children, by Marjorie Heins This book studies censorship that has been based on the assumption that minors must be protected from controversial or provocative art, information and ideas.
Related: » Not In Front of the Children Wins American Library Association Award
» Author Marjorie Heins Responds to Critics
» Youth Respond to Not In Front of the Children

» NCAC Reviews Recent Youth Censorship Books A book review on Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex by Judith Levine and The First Amendment and Civil Liability by Robert M. O'Neil.
Related:» NCAC Letter to University of Minnesota President About Harmful to Minors » Censors and Schools: The Battle Over Children's Literature A panel discussion, hosted by the NCAC on Sept. 28, 2000, on censorship of children's literature.

» Censorship's Tools Du Jour: V-Chips, TV Ratings, PICS and Internet Filters A background paper on the tools that aim to make film, television and the Internet "kid-safe" environments.

» Brief NCAC Article on Censors Who Claim to Protect Children Joan E. Bertin posits that children will function better in the world if they are allowed to explore it, with guidance from parents, teachers, and other adults.

» NCAC's Book Censorship Toolkit A resource guide for dealing with book challenges in schools.

» Is Harry Potter Evil? Acclaimed author and NCAC Board Member Judy Blume writes in The New York Times about the Harry Potter book-banning trend, and why books that excite children should be promoted, not censored.

» Don't Cave In to the Book Banners NCAC Executive Director Joan Bertin writes in Newsday about the never-ending battle between those who claim to protect children from harm and the books those children want to read.

» Censors and Schools: The Battle Over Children's Literature A panel discussion, hosted by the NCAC on Sept. 28, 2000, on censorship of children's literature.

» NCAC Defends Books in Trouble A status report of books being challenged or banned.

» Religious Right Aims to Pit Parents Against Teachers in Book Censorship Battles The Religious Right insists that public school officials have some nefarious scheme for subverting "parental rights," primarily by choosing curriculum and other material that are at odds with their moral values.

» December 19th, 2006 Student Online Expression: What Do the Internet and MySpace Mean for Students' First Amendment Rights? (First Amendment Center)First Forum report by David L. Hudson Jr., First Amendment Center research attorney.

» The Internet and Education: A Close Fit In this excerp from the February 21, 1997 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard President Neil Rudenstine addresses the revolutionary impact of the Internet on scholarship, teaching and learning.

» Netizen Report on Religious Right Connections to Major Internet Filters
As the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Free Expression Policy Project have extensively reported, Internet filtering systems routinely censor artistic and literary sites, human rights information, and communications dealing with public health and sexuality education. (insert anchor) (See Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report for more details.) NCAC supporters may now be interested to know of another bias in filtering systems: religion. Nancy Willard at the University of Oregon's Center for Advanced Technology in Education recently published a paper called: Filtering Software: The Religious Connection, which exposes the unsettling relationship between some prominent filtering companies and conservative religious groups. In it, she notes that several filtering systems with a major presence in public schools have a history of functioning as religious Internet Service Providers and/or espousing conservative philosophies. NCAC and FEPP believe that this delegation of educational decisions to companies with religious agendas poses a great danger to the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.
» Read Willard's report in its entirety

» NCAC Urges Internet Online Summit to Respect First Amendment Rights The NCAC press release urging participants of the Internet Online Summit, a conference dominated by an effort to restrict children's access to certain kinds of materials on the Internet, to respect First Amendment rights.

» NCAC Letter to Vice President Gore About Internet Censorship The NCAC expresses its concern to Vice President Gore regarding his endorsement of the "Parents' Protection Page," an Internet tool that facilitates Internet censorship.

» NCAC Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Internet Access in Schools The NCAC's statement regarding Senator John McCain's legislative proposal to limit students' access to "indecent" material on the Internet.
Related: » NCAC Letter to Key Senators Regarding Efforts to Restrict Internet Access

» LGBT Resisting Homphobic Attacks on Education and the Arts A report on homophobic attacks on education and the arts and how to resist them.
Related: » Homophobic Attacks on Schools and Libraries

» Censorship In Our Schools and Libraries A primer on how to prepare for a censorship dispute before it arises.

Related: NCAC's Book Censorship Toolkit: A resource guide for dealing with book challenges in schools.

» NCAC Counters Censorship In Our Schools and Libraries Information on the NCAC program that helps educators, librarians, parents, and "ordinary" citizens fight efforts to censor materials in schools and libraries.

» NCAC Comes to Defense of Teachers and Educators Under Fire From Censors Without the efforts of persevering educators, our kids' schooling would become bland and boring, leaving them to figure out answers to life's hard questions alone.

» Art and Nudity A statement on artistic works containing nudity and they myth that such works harm children.

» Sex Education Abstinence-only Education: Why First Amendment Supporters Should Oppose It An NCAC statement paper on abstinence-only education.
Related:» Abstinence-only Press Kit

» Sex and the Censors A review of sex-censorship cases.

» Joint Statement Opposing Government Censorship of Sex Ed The NCAC and 34 other free speech groups released this statement regarding its public education campaign to oppose the Coingressional re-authorization of federal funding for abstinence-only education.

» Surgeon General's Report Recommends Comprehensive Sex Ed The NCAC applauded the U.S. Surgeon General's Report on sexual health and behavior that called for comprehensive sexuality education to begin early in life.

» Opposition to Censored Sex-Ed Grows A Human Rights Watch study of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs in Texas documents the risks to young people from withholding life-saving HIV prevention information.

» A Brief NCAC Statement Championing For Comprehensive Sex Ed Joan E. Bertin boils down the arguments for why abstinence-only sex education doesn't cut it.

» Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Word The Executive Coordinator of Network for Family Life Education writes on the strange campagin afoot to remove the S-word from our lexicon.

» Sex and Censorship: Dangers to Minors and Others? A review of the Sex and Censorship seminar sponsored by the NCAC in June 1998.

» Joint Letter to American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Regarding its Misstatements About Media Violence The NCAC, among other organizations, respond to the AAP's misstatements on the correlation of viewing media violence and violent behavior.
Related: » Joint Press Release Regarding AAP's Misstatements About Media Violence

» Testimony of NCAC Executive Director Before Task Force on Youth Violence and the Entertainment Industry Joan E. Bertin, Executive Director of the NCAC, delivered this testimony before the Task Force on Youth Violence and the Entertainment Industry on October 6, 1999.
Related: » Summary of Joan E. Bertin's Testimony

» Political Candidates Seek to Broaden Their Appeal, Picking Fantasy Violence as Their Target Vice-President Gore, Senator Joseph Lieberman, and Lynne Cheney, blamed Hollywood, popular music and video-games for corrupting youth, at hearings on a Federal Trade Commission report chaired by Senator John McCain.

» Violent Imagery and the First Amendment Although some people draw a distinction between "gratuitous" violence and violence which is used to convey a message, the First Amendment does not make such a distinction.