Tag Archives: moral panic

Who Will Defend Hate Speech?

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Bang On Target
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Defending the right of people to publish and watch porn is an uphill battle. Nice, “liberal” people aren’t always as liberal as they think, and many think sexual imagery is a Bad Thing, and shouldn’t fall under the umbrella of free expression. So there was a strong boost for the anti-censorship movement in December when the UK “porn filters” were rolled out, and it turned out that they weren’t really much to do with porn at all.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a genuine free speech lobby in this country (it was the discovery of this fact that led me to set up the Sex & Censorship campaign). However, the filters blocked such broad areas of content that far more vocal groups have been spurred into opposition, and have strengthened the anti-censorship movement. The revelation that a number of gay sites had been blocked, apparently in error, led to outrage from the LGBT community and its supporters. And the inclusion of Sex Education as a category that parents could prevent their teens from accessing caused outrage among many commentators.

The animal protection organisation World Wildlife Fund adopted the panda as its symbol, rather than some endangered species of lizard or beetle, because pandas look cuddly. Saving ugly creatures isn’t a cause that many people will donate to. In the world of anti-censorship campaigning, LGBT and sex education causes are the panda; and yet, many of the “uglier” blocked categories should be just as much a cause for concern as the “pretty” ones. But if people accept that some expression can be censored, then free speech is lost.

Many of the blocked categories have been ignored because they don’t upset any large lobby group, but they should be cause for concern. I have seen no defence, for example for “sites that give information on illegal drugs”. Yet such sites save lives, and fill a role that, in a more sane world, would be carried out by government. The site pillreports.com, for example, is a database of ecstasy tablets on the market. As the site says: ‘Pills sold as “Ecstasy” often include other, potentially more dangerous, substances such as methamphetamine, ketamine and PMA.’ Filtering of drug information doesn’t protect anyone, but simply enforces an anti-drug morality. If allowed to continue, this filtering will doubtless cost teenage lives.

“Sites that promote self-harm” may make for good Daily Mail headlines, but people in distress most need a community of people who understand them. Isolating troubled young people from each other can only be a recipe for disaster. “Sites that describe guns” are also on the list, and illustrate the constant confusion between expression and the physical world. America’s gun lobbyists try to claim that “guns don’t kill people”; this is patent nonsense. Guns do kill people: but there’s no evidence that pictures or descriptions of guns do, and in fact guns are shown daily on TV, often in glamorised ways, without any evidence that this leads to real-world violence.

The option to block social networking sites is perhaps one of the most sinister of all. Depriving children of social contact may be classified as emotional abuse, and yet, because of the endless panic over “online grooming”, many parents may exercise this option. The best way to open a child to the possibility of grooming is to keep them ignorant of the real world. The filters will harm children.

The “file sharing” category is not there to protect children at all, but to protect media corporations from having their content pirated, and probably the result of some clever lobbying activity. Piracy is the problem of the media and entertainment industry, and is a poor excuse for censorship.

The catch-all category of “tasteless and obscene” is another one that preserves conservative ideas of morality, rather than attempt to protect children. Among other things, it includes the ludicrous concept of “how to commit murder”; one would think any teenager conversant with basic physics, chemistry or biology would be able to work that out. Presumably the banning of science classes in school must follow. This category also includes “bathroom humour”, though one must suspect that children can work out fart jokes by themselves, without help from the Internet.

The list goes on and on. In every case, it seems that blocking content can do more damage to child development than the content itself. The category that most divides people is that of hate speech: “sites that encourage the oppression of people or groups based on their race, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation or nationality”. The idea that racism, homophobia and other prejudices can be dealt with by censorship has been fashionable for a few decades, and is attractive to people who dislike prejudice. And yet it is a false promise. Censorship of words that might offend minorities has never solved any underlying problem. Discourse is the solution to bigotry, and this must include angry, “offensive” discourse, however unpleasant it is. Politically correct cures for prejudice do not work; indeed, they leave problems to fester and get worse.

This isn’t to say that prejudice should be left alone: education, discussion, debate, argument and, most of all, leadership are essential. We have a government that wants to protect us from “hate speech” on the one hand, while hinting on the other that immigrants are a threat to our society. Hate can be spread without using hate speech.

And those who think that censorship introduced for “good” reasons will not then be abused are naive in the extreme. The core problem with censorship is that it will always be abused by those with power. Once it is accepted that hateful speech can be suppressed, then the definition of hateful speech will grow inexorably until it is unrecognisable.

Voltaire said: “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. Those who are tempted to draw acceptable lines for Internet filtering are missing the point. In a free society, there can be no acceptable lines.

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Concerns Raised Over “Child Protection” Conference

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The UK video-on-demand regulator, ATVOD, has announced a conference on child protection, to be held in London on 12th December. In an open letter, below, we raise concerns with the nature of the conference and some of the speakers to be featured. (UPDATE: a response was received on 19th November, and has been appended to the end of this post).

Jerry Barnett
SexAndCensorship.org

18 November 2013

Open letter to: Julia Hornle, ATVOD board member

Cc: Sue Berelowitz – Deputy Children’s Commissioner

 

Dear Julia,

I am writing with regard to the ATVOD-organised child protection conference taking place in London on 12th December. I am informed that you selected the conference speakers. I write on behalf of a number of people who are greatly concerned that the conference line-up is not altogether suitable for an event whose purported goal is to determine what best can be done to protect British children.

The concerns are twofold: first, the lack of expertise related to the effects of content on viewers, including children and teenagers, and second the inclusion of two speakers whose beliefs seem out of place at a conference dedicated to child protection.

On the first point: How children and teenagers are affected by what they see online is widely debated. A great deal of research has been done over several decades, and a good deal has yet to be done. There is still however no conclusive evidence to support how harm, if any, is done by  sexual, violent, or other material and it would therefore seem premature to suggest remedies until the existence and nature of any problem is properly understood.

For this reason, it is puzzling that the conference speaker list includes no expertise on this matter, and yet plenty of expertise does exist. It would seem suitable to include a child psychologist, or somebody who has directly tried to research the effects of viewing such material.

A number of suitable individuals come to mind, but we might suggest:

  • Dr Guy Cumberbatch is a chartered psychologist who has been commissioned previously by Ofcom to conduct research on this very subject area. It would seem sensible that the conference should be informed by an expert in child psychology before coming to any conclusions.

  • Dr Clarissa Smith is Professor of Sexual Cultures at Sunderland University, and (along with colleagues) is conducting the most exhaustive study to date into the effects of pornography on its users.

  • Sharon Girling is a former senior Police officer with national responsibility, now an independent consultant, and probably the UK’s leading authority on online child abuse imagery, and protecting abused children who are identified from such imagery.

It may be dangerous to rush towards policy-making without input, at such a critical event, from people such as the above. As history shows, rashly drafted laws and regulations might disrupt existing child protection activities, and thus have the reverse effect to that originally intended.

On the second point: we note with concern the inclusion of the following two speakers:

  • Paula Hall is billed as Chair of the Association for the Treatment of Sex Addiction and Compulsivity. However, there is widespread skepticism among mental health professionals that “sex addiction” is even a genuine condition, or whether it simply stigmatises normal sexual response. Although “hypersexuality” was previously accepted as a psychiatric condition (as once was homosexuality), it has now been removed from the most recent manual of psychiatry, DSM-V. It is worrying that you consider what many believe to be quack psychiatry to be relevant to this discussion.

  • Julia Long is a spokesperson for the morality group Object, which campaigns against all forms of sexual expression, whether consumed by children or adults. Object frequently attempt to link adult material to sexual violence, although they have no evidence to back this point of view. They have claimed (without evidential foundation) that adults are harmed by accessing pornography, reading lads’ mags and visiting strip clubs. Again, their inclusion seems incongruous at a conference aimed at protecting children, a subject in which Object and Ms Long herself appear to have no expertise or prior interest.

The anomalies in the conference line-up have led to questions as to whether this event is about child protection or Internet censorship. I look forward to your response, and hope that you can put minds at rest regarding your goals in setting up the conference panels.

Regards,

 

Jerry Barnett
SexAndCensorship.org

 UPDATE: the following response was received on 19 November:

Emailed on Behalf of Julia Hornle

Dear Mr Barnett,

Thank you for your letter and suggestions for the joint ATVOD-QMUL conference on 12th December.

We have finalised the composition of the panels and speakers.  I’m familiar with the work of the speakers you suggest and have no doubt that they also have interesting contributions to make, perhaps at a different conference.  Please let me know if you are organising such an event in the future.

Kind Regards,

1984-2014: Conference Will Mark 30 Years of UK Censorship

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The Sex & Censorship campaign is pleased to announce that Jerry Barnett, the campaign founder, will appear as a keynote speaker at a conference on censorship, called to mark 30 years since the Video Recordings Act introduced a regime of video censorship to Britain. The event, titled 1984: Freedom and Censorship in the Media – Where Are We Now?, will take place at Sunderland University on April 8-9 2014.

The organisers have released an excellent two-minute video to promote the event, which you can see below. Please watch and share! Further information about the conference can be found at the event web site.

The Sexualisation Panic

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As the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin said, “A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth”. So it is with many of the Porn Panic stories that have emerged over the past few years, each designed to frighten us into believing that a free and open Internet is a threat to our children and the very fabric of our society.

In 1984, Britain introduced the toughest video censorship regime of any democratic nation, following several years of media hysteria which is now better known as the Video Nasties moral panic. The British public were told that horror films on video were turning children into potential rapists and murderers. The architects of the panic further claimed that we could not leave parents to decide what their children should watch, because Bad Parents were allowing their children to watch scenes of horrific sex and violence. Therefore, the only possible way to save our society from imminent collapse was to empower the BBFC to censor videos before the public could be allowed to buy them. As a result, even today, British people cannot (legally) buy many DVDs that are available in most of the free world.

Those who are familiar with the Video Nasties panic have seen an almost identical copy of it emerge in the past five years or so: the Sexualisation Panic. We are told that our children and our very culture have been “Sexualised”. This time, the blame is mostly put on online porn, along with lads’ mags and other “Sexualised” media. Although parental control systems work perfectly well, the panic architects tell us that more must be done, because (wait for it…) Bad Parents are refusing to protect their kids!

There is something uniquely odd about British culture. Most countries don’t experience these intermittent panics. Just as Britain was the only European country to scare itself to death over horror videos, now it is the only European country to get itself agitated about online porn (which, don’t forget, has been with us for almost 20 years).

But is there any evidence that Sexualisation is real? In a word: No. The architects of this panic have failed to provide any, opting instead to create a drumbeat of fear via Britain’s newspapers. As with Video Nasties, journalists and editors have simply repeated the scare stories without ever asking for evidence from those who are banging the Sexualisation drum.

The Sexualisation myth originates largely from two government papers; the first was published by the outgoing Labour government, and the second (in 2011) by the new Coalition government. This second report, known as the Bailey Review of Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood, is the prime root source of the panic that has unfolded.

And yet, the Bailey Review is not a study of Sexualisation at all, but merely a study of what the public thinks about Sexualisation. The sex researcher Dr Brooke Magnanti analysed the Bailey Review and found that it contained no evidence to back the idea that children were being Sexualised:

It does not summarise any academic evidence regarding sexualisation…

It does not conduct new evidence seeking regarding the effects of early commercialisation or sexualisation…

It does offer the results of questionnaires and focus groups…

It does make a number of recommendations, purportedly based on the results of the questionnaires and focus groups; however, close examination shows that in many cases, the responses do not support the changes suggested.

It is also worth noting that Reg Bailey is not a child psychologist, but in fact is head of a large, international Christian organisation, Mothers’ Union. Why did the government pick a religious leader to undertake this study? Why has the press swallowed Bailey’s opinions and regurgitated them as fact? Because moral panics don’t exist in a vacuum: they are created to justify censorship, and just as the Video Nasties panic culminated in the Video Recordings Act 1984, so this panic is aimed at legislation to introduce Internet censorship.

We need to also stand up for our children, and ensure they are treated with the same respect as children in the rest of Europe. We do not create caring adults by treating children as idiots who cannot be trusted to use the Internet, or by denying parents the right to control what their children see and hear.

As for Sexualisation? The evidence suggests that teenagers are becoming more, not less grown-up about sex and sexuality. In Britain, teenage pregnancy rates are the lowest since the 1960s. The Internet, with its free and open access to information has created a more sexually mature generation of young people than we have ever seen before.

There is no cause for panic, but there are powerful vested interests that want to close off the British public from the outside world, just as they tried to do when video appeared in the 1980s. This time, we need to stop the panic before Britain loses access to a free and open Internet.