Arguments for Film Censorship

Although the central debate is about the rights and wrongs of censorship the vast majority believe that there is a 'minimum standard' that supports censorship in any event. This minimum standard supports censorship where the offending film:

1. Involves non-consensual sex and/or sexual violence

2. Involves the ill-treatment of animals and/or child actors

Beyond these two points we have to consider a debate that revolves around censorship and its impact on responsible adults. Those who believe in some form of film censorship hold the view that censorship protects the moral values that are prevalent in society, thus it reflects our values.

The counter-argument is that censorship imposes the values of certain people, who do not necessarily respect the rest of us, and it assumes that we are not capable of mature, safe responses to 'immoral' material.

Most people's views on censorship depend on the context. There is a kind of continuum - at one end there is the view that media, including cinema, influence people and teach behaviour, like the hypodermic needle injecting 'effects' into passive viewers. At the other end, there is the anti-censorship view, which feels that we are able to understand texts as works of fiction or art; if an individual commits an act of violence in response to a media experience, then the psychological condition of the perpetrator is the problem, not the film. In between are those of us who think that classification and information is needed and those who believe that some kinds of films might be 'harmful', but that others are not.

One famous advocate of censorship was the late Mary Whitehouse. For many years she lobbied for the banning of films and TV programmes, on the grounds that media images of sex and violence are in part responsible for the decline of moral standards in society.

Whitehouse claimed that it is indisputable that young people are vulnerable to harmful screen images. She used accounts from psychologists and researchers to apparently prove the link between violent acts and exposure to violent images. In particular, Whitehouse decried films where violence is depicted without moral context, or where violence is not punished. In this sense, those concerned about the effects of film images differentiate between the contexts for such images (i.e. the rationale for, or the justification for the violence).

Whitehouse believed that the burning issue is one of protection, arguing that it is a matter of getting filmmakers to accept a sense of their own responsibility for the health and welfare of the whole of society, especially for the welfare of children. She may be a rather extreme example of the pro-censorship lobby (and here we have dealt only with violence, remember there are at least six other criteria which have been used to scrutinise film content), but her views do resonate, in part at least, with those who believe that:

• Films are potentially influential
• Viewers of films receive messages, which, in some cases, they need to be protected from
• There are certain people who are capable of judging what others should be able to see