[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I stand by my comment about the status of ideas. As an example, let's say that three people read Lord of the Flies. One of those people goes away with a lot of new ideas about the nature of mankind; one of them decides that it was all rather boring, but the third decides that painting one's face and hunting other people down sounds like fun. That wasn't the intention of the author; it wasn't the sort of thing that a reasonable person would think, but the idea would have been planted nonetheless. That same person could read The Lord of the Rings, decide for some reason that it was an invitation to Satanism and sacrifice their cat accordingly. You can't predict what will or will not be dangerous, as the interpretation of the idea and the resultant action are subjective individual acts.

To censor works of literature, film or television is to reduce human beings to the status of automata, who mindlessly follow whatever idea is put into their heads without thought or question. This makes excuses for people's behaviour by shifting the blame to a source of ideas when it is actually shared by the individual and those responsible for that person's welfare. If anything, the absence of debate implicit in censorship merely contributes to the development of an uncritical and impressionable mind, totally unprepared for life in the real world. Such people make good consumers, but there is little that they can't be persuaded to do. Of course later they were "just obeying orders".

As to the efficacy of restricting the flow of ideas, Christianity again offers us an example. During centuries of repression it spread like wildfire and no amount of legal or other control could stop it; a couple of centuries on the side of the establishment and it's losing ground. People aren't so easy to control, regardless of age.