Age Of Consent

There are obviously boundaries as to who should view what, but these boundaries are extremely unclear. Parameters are in place to try and prevent children from viewing such things, but these are easily bypass-able. For example, the security on YouTube allows for videos to be flagged by users if deemed inappropriate. If flagged, the video will then only be viewable by people 18 or older, and if it's continually flagged then the video will be taken down. But the obvious error in this is that anyone of any age can make an account saying they're 18 and then be able to view these videos.

At the same time, children have different levels of maturity. A child who grew up in the suburbs would have a different level of maturity and a different state of mind than someone who grew up in the ghetto. Children have different levels of maturity and different ideas of what's acceptable. This is usually instilled by parents as well. An old friend of mine grew up believing that the word for fart was "Phanny Burp." He believed this until he was 14 because his mother thought that fart was a bad word. Should he have been censored? is fart a bad word? was it fair to keep him from knowing "bad words" and resulting in him being mocked, teased, and bullied in school for using words and phrases like "phanny burp?"

Censorship is different for everyone, and usually controlled by parents. I know the first time I saw a pg13 movie, i was 11 and it was Pirates of the Caribbean. My friend who i was watching it with had already seen several pg13 and R movies, though she was the same age as me. She was also much more mature and could handle it while i had nightmares about the undead pirate haunting me for weeks to come. The age of consent all depends on the mentality of the child, their maturity because i know people my age now who are too fragile to see something like a sex scene or violence in Lord of the Rings, whereas other people my age are totally into that kind of thing and enjoy it. People would say about my fragile friend, "She's seventeen, she can handle it," but can she? if we were all 5 or 6 years younger, they'd be praising her for her goodness ad scolding my more "mature" friend for being exposed to this at such a young age. There is no specific age, it all depends on the maturity and mental state of the person. This usually is affected by parenting, schooling, the general environment in which a child is raised.