Over the years, she says, she realized that she was constantly coming up against the assumption that censorship -- from obscenity laws to book banning to V-chips to Internet filters -- could be justified if the material in question presented clear "harm to minors."

"Even people in the civil liberties camp," says Heins, "were of the mind that there is a great social necessity to censor material that minors are exposed to. The debate wasn't going anywhere -- it wasn't even a debate."

What, exactly, is material that causes "harm to minors"? Is it "Huckleberry Finn" or the work of Maya Angelou? Violent video games or R-rated movies? Graphic sexual content or comprehensive sex education?

	Also Today The morality police Our deluded attempts to shield kids from images of sex and violence that won't hurt them are trampling the First Amendment. By Charles Taylor Print story E-mail story

Actually, as Heins found out, all of the above have been suppressed in the name of protecting children, despite the fact, she says, that social science has failed to provide convincing evidence that exposure to sexual or violent content has any negative impact on minors whatsoever.

Heins decided to trace the history of American obscenity laws to find the roots of the "harm to minors" argument. The result is "Not in Front of the Children: 'Indecency,' Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth," a book that chronicles the ideological and political underpinnings of censorship from Plato to the Victorians to the present day.

Not only have the First Amendment rights of adults been abridged in the name of protecting the innocence of youth, Heins argues; many times, obscenity laws have actually done more harm to minors than good. Because of censorship, many children have not been equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary for living in a democratic society, she says. In some cases, minors have been denied access to information -- like comprehensive sex education -- that could literally save their lives, maintains Heins.

"I would like to move the political dialogue beyond the repetitive media bashing, censorship laws, restrictions on school libraries, Internet filters," says Heins. "It's reached the point of an epidemic. It's not advancing any social purpose."

In a telephone interview from her office in New York, Heins spoke about the fallacy of the "harm to minors" argument, the insidiousness of V-chips and Internet filtering and her belief in the need to replace media censorship with media literacy.

You were involved in ACLU vs. Reno, the case in which the Supreme Court ruled against the 1996 Communications Decency Act. In December 2000, Congress passed a law mandating Internet filters on all library computers if a library receives federal funds. Is a law mandating filters any less censorious than one that criminalizes certain kinds of content on the Web?

The Communications Decency Act was a criminal law, based on an "indecent" or "patent offensiveness" standard. We had plaintiffs from Human Rights Watch to Planned Parenthood to Stop Prison Rape to Wildcat Press, a gay and lesbian press for teens [all of whom would have had their sites blocked under the act]. The Supreme Court agreed with us that "patent offensiveness" was a standard that was much too broad.

After the defeat of the CDA, Internet filtering became more and more aggressively promoted by the manufacturers of the product and political leaders.

In many ways, Internet filters are more insidious than a criminal law, because criminal law looks at the context: whether or not limiting access will be a deterrent, how many people will be affected and so on. But with an Internet filter, you have direct censorship with a very broad brush.

All the filters have to rely on keywords. Some of them claim to be beyond the early, primitive days when they blocked out "breast cancer" and "breast of chicken," "Anne Sexton" and "sex discrimination."

But there is no way that any of these companies can screen over a billion Web sites, many of which change daily, so they have to rely on mechanical means. And no matter how sophisticated your software, you are relying on a machine that identifies words and phrases. About a year ago, a company claimed it could find pornographic images. It turned out that their filters were blocking out landscapes!

Here is another example: "At least 21" and "no one under 18" are key phrases that are often found on pornographic sites, though those sites often have a barrier anyway -- usually, you have to give a credit card number. But these phrases are also found in news reports. I'm looking at my screen right now: "At least 21 people were killed in Indonesia." That site was blocked by Cybersitter.

On top of these examples of unintentional blocking, you also have intended blocking. Almost all of these filters intentionally block access to sex education. Like a lot of us, they can't distinguish between pornography and sex education.

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