Can a Pop Song Violate Children's Rights?
In Colombia, a court claims the answer is yes. Could that happen here?
The song "+57," from the Colombian musicians Karol G, J Balvin, and several others, violates the rights of children, a Colombian court has ruled. The Associated Press reports that the court has ordered the artists "to refrain from publishing music that violates the rights of children and teenagers."
How can a song violate someone's rights, let alone the rights of multiple people? Unless we're talking about copyrights, it makes little sense. And no, the court isn't saying that kids of Colombia have a collective copyright claim to "+57."
The issue is lyrics in the song that could be read as sexualizing a teen girl. The court claims these lyrics represent a violation of children's rights.
"Sexualizing minors reduces them to becoming objects of desire, and exposes them to risks that can affect their development," the 14-page ruling says.
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A Blow to Artistic Freedom—And Feminist Protest?
"+57" is about someone who goes out partying after telling her boyfriend she is going to sleep. The contested lyrics—sung in Spanish—call someone "a hot mama since she was 14" and say "although that baby has an owner, she goes out whenever she wants," according to a Billboard translation of the lyrics.
Some Columbians argue that the backlash against the song represents class bias, moral panic, and a distaste for reggaeton music, according to a New York Times piece last fall on the controversy. It's hard to look at those lyrics and not get the feeling they're right.
These are not graphic lyrics. The outrage over them isn't about preventing a patently offensive and obscene depiction from reaching people's ears, or stopping some pedophilic exploiters from airing fantasies.
These are lyrics that tell a narrative about a particular fictional character. It is a story, albeit a pretty light one—most of the song is just about drinking and dancing and partying behind the boyfriend's back. The character is clearly meant to be young, though nothing indicates she's still under age 18. Nor is there reason to believe that the song's creators are celebrating the idea of her having been a "mamacita" from a young age.
In any event, declaring these lyrics a rights violation obviously won't stop any actual sexual harm against children. All it does is stop people from singing about it.
It's hard to imagine who might be helped at all by a ruling against lyrics like these. But it's easy to see how the situation is an affront to artistic freedom—and how it could curb people's ability to speak out against the sexualization of minors and sexual exploitation.
For what it's worth, the musicians changed the lyrics last fall to "since she was 18," and Karol G, known as a champion for women's causes, apologized but also said people were taking the lyrics out of context and in the wrong way.
It Can't Happen Here?
The idea that song lyrics sexualizing minors should be criminal seems far removed from U.S. conceptions of free speech and artistic freedom. But is it?
A number of Republican-controlled states and GOP lawmakers have been trying to toughen rules against performances, books, and other artworks that they deem "harmful to minors." The particulars of these efforts differ slightly, but at the heart of all of them is an effort to go beyond just restricting and criminalizing things that could be considered "obscene" (itself an imperfect and subjective standard, despite the Miller test) and instead creating even more broad and subjective rules.
These efforts are steeped in the language of protecting "children" from sexualization, but often fail to distinguish between age groups (as if what's inappropriate for a 6-year-old is necessarily inappropriate for a 16-year-old as well) and take a highly conservative view of what is OK even for older kids. They also tend to come down hard on LGBTQ content.
State proposals to limit material "harmful to minors" often hinge on the idea that it will be developmentally dangerous for young people to encounter said material, not that the mere existence of such material violates their rights. But it doesn't seem like a huge leap from some of these efforts to declaring sexual song lyrics—or stories, or anything else—a rights violation.
Would the First Amendment allow this? It shouldn't, of course.
But even if Colombian-style efforts in the U.S. would eventually get struck down, they could still do damage. After all, the effect of all these "harmful to minors" measures we're currently seeing isn't limited to banning existing works of art. Even vague and unenforced rules can have a chilling effect, making institutions more reticent in what they feature in the first place. They can also create new avenues for government coercion, allowing the authorities to threaten action on "harm to minors" grounds in order to get groups to do what they want more broadly.
The idea that a pop song can violate children's rights in the way the Colombian courts suggest is silly. But the idea that panic about pop songs could cause violations of free speech rights seems all too clear.
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