That immediately paves the way for expansion of those restrictions.
We see that currently with efforts to "protect the children" by limiting access to things like porn. It's reasonable on it's face but immediately gets weaponised to start banning access to any content that isn't gender or sex normative.
There is a very intentional framing of "protecting children" while book bans are really targeting what are more fairly described as "young adults". The goal is of course ensuring young adults are only exposed to a certain world view.
Yes, "content that isn't gender or sex normative" should be included. Children should not be exposed to sexual subcultures or encouraged to experiment with gender non-conformity. They are not ready to handle that.
Is a book character being gay unsafe for kids in a way that the same character being straight is not?
If a pre-teen can understand the concept of sex, what’s so difficult about explaining that _some_ people have non-mainstream sexual attraction?
A better example is restricting access to actually dangerous ideas, like “Mein Kampf”.
But yeah, I don't want to be expressly forbidding disagreeable content to my kids, I want them to learn to choose content that is worthwhile themselves.
They cannot and do not understand that concept which is why exposing them to it is a serious criminal offence.
Whether or not they should learn that as a pre-teen is certainly up for debate, and many people / cultures have different opinions on that.
The problem is you'll be hard-pressed to have one without the other - not to mention that even if it starts off like that, the system is so easily abused to destroy privacy on the Internet for everyone, not just kids.
And by the way, I do actually believe more people need to see graphic violence, and I do believe it helps people grow. We all hear about gun violence and club shootings and the like, but it doesn't drive home the reality of it.
Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.
I'm not saying exposure to such material doesn't risk traumatizing a child or even an adult, or that I am entirely untraumatized by what I've seen, but it still pales in comparison to the violence I faced at home. The problem is that it's like abstinence or prohibition: If such material is legally restricted, when people do encounter these materials, it won't be in a safe environment and the risk for trauma is much greater. To be clear, I do understand that some people fetishize violence, but I believe this risk is also greater if there is not a safe avenue for understanding the darkest sides of humanity.
But on the subject of compulsion: there is definitely a line where utility is not worth the trauma, but as a child I was shown images of the Holocaust, of emaciated and abused Jews, and that has influenced me to now be against Israel and their continued holocaust against the Palestinian people, so I'm quite thankful for that.
In general, because school introduced me to it, I read quite a lot of Holocaust-related literature in my free time, both fiction and nonfiction, and that led me to learning about ongoing genocides and neoliberal violence-backed economic power struggles, and identifying with other oppressed people across the globe, greatly influencing my politics and turning me into the exact kind of person that my current state considers radical and would love to imprison and extract slave labor from.
Not everyone has this reaction, because what they have been exposed to shapes how that content will affect them.
Specifically people who have been victims of serious assault or even witnessed that can have a much worse, and irreversible reaction to you when seeing things that make those memories come to the fore as recurrent, intrusive thoughts, which then affect their behavior and lives. That is really what the restriction of content should be about if anything: helping people avoid things they want to avoid.
The people who have struggled (especially at a young age) with real trauma often come across as distant, quiet or anti-social; sometimes they never were so before. But often, our community where this behavior is more normalized, is where those people come, even if they don't have a primary interest in the community, to feel normal again, while still feeling fearful or full of empathy. You may have trauma, or not, depending on what violence you faced. However, even with violence, people react in wildly different ways, for one, women are much more anxious and cautious after feeling at risk or violated than men, so you really cannot assume that how you feel represents how a woman would (for evolutionary sensible reasons). Meanwhile, men often suppress their emotions (at a truly deep level, killing their relationships).
The problem with saying that prohibition necessarily means they will encounter the material in an unsafe environment is that, someone who has been assaulted or abused is already in an unsafe environment, everywhere, in their mind, and for legitimate and rationale reasons. The world is different when you know police will generally not deeply investigate a serious crime, when one has been personally been conducted against you. Seeing content like that, can prolong or make permanent that state of being, which can leave to bad and convoluted consequences later on. It is easier to understand this if you have children or have seen real pain and suffering with someone you love too, that can give you the empathy to understand this reaction.
It is hard to understand psychological damage unless you or someone you truly love and have strong empathy with goes through it. Until then, it's hard to understand or imagine at all how other people might be affected by some things. They will not always have your reaction to content which is extreme. I do not agree with prohibition, but do consider that others can have different reactions to you, ones you possibly cannot imagine.
Put another way, many times, we label content extreme not because it is extreme for everyone. We label it, because for some group of people, at some point, it could set their own lives back a lot to encounter it, and these people are already suffering more than the average person. It's about helping them avoid more pain.
Obviously this does not apply to all content, but for your examples, it does. Do not imagine there are not blue collar workers who have seen close friends suffer similar pain to the fate you mention, haunted by it. Men who would break at the knees at the sight of that kind of video. There are. You brush shoulders with them on the street. We can understand the dark sides of humanity through history and the written word (which I believe should be fully unrestricted), but not everything needs the very human, memory-provoking visual element.
I remember when it was fashionable for trolls to post shock images like tubgirl or lathe accidents. I seen to have survived ok.
People would get in less street fights and do less dumb shit if they knew what the world was like. The cartels are not your friend, falling and hitting your head can kill you, wearing a seatbelt is mandatory, there are no winners in armed conflict, factory farming is not ethical, etc.
People that say these things, but they don't truly understand them until they see it.
It’s very easy to fetishise war when you have not seen the grim barbarity of true conflict.
It’s not like the movies, and we should not think of it as a desired or easily entered venture.
Street/Knife fights are another, I’ve seen them first hand and its impressive how mundane things or subtle movements are actually just lethal. There’s a saying that “The winner of a knife fight is the one who dies at the hospital” but even glib phrases like this are not enough to prepare you.
Kids would be less keen to join gangs if they saw the brutality before thinking they might get cool points.
> I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry.
And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of this has anything to do with viewpoints. I wish I had found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about animals and people being tortured.
But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me being a more well rounded person.
I think a far more effective actionable path here is disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding how their children are raised. We still ascribe very diligently to the Western notion that children effectively "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the single authority figure that decides how this person is raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that, for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable choice, is horrendous. This is a whole other person, this child is, and in our current system they are effectively a resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18 (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems.
A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter, but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon reams of evidence of parents doing inconceivable evils to their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced rights? They're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial. They do not have the right to free association, parents destroy relationships their children have all the time, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect, sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities, and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put a hard limit on even that.
The notion that parents should have 100% authority to effectively shape other, new people into being whatever they think they should be is frankly unhinged if you think about it for more than a few moments. This isn't a matter of coming to grips with a child different from yourself, and learning who they are, and helping them be the best them that they can be: this authority grants parents the right to determine what a child can be, with ZERO oversight, and no ability for the child themselves to speak on the subject until it's possibly a decade or more too late.
It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if said rights are potentially to be utilized against this unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.