Sissela Bok

Sissela Bok is a professor of population and development studies at Harvard University and the author of the 1998 book Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, from which this article is excerpted. In it she discusses the emerging debate over whether some types of violent entertainment justify censorship. While government censorship of pornography has long been legally accepted, only since the 1990s have legal scholars begun to debate whether censorship of media violence is similarly justified in order to protect children. Bok summarizes the views of several law professors, judges, and authors who disagree over whether violent entertainment should be protected under the First Amendment right to free speech.

BEFORE THE 1989 UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION on the Rights of the Child (CRC), neither the U.S. Bill of Rights, nor the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, nor any...