such images may give a child a picture of how it might vent its rage,’ 51 and thus may lead to copycat violence. In some countries, children are protected from excessive exposure to violence. The Constitutional Court of Germany has explained the need to prevent children from access to harmful material by focusing on ‘all printed matter, films, or pictures that glorify violence or crime, provoke racial hatred, glorify war, constitute [moral] harm and thus may lead to serious or even irreversible injury.’52 This has led to heightened criteria for scrutiny for children than for adults. It is useful to recall that the German Criminal Code prohibits the production or dissemination of material that describes ‘cruel or inhuman acts of violence against human beings in a manner expressing glorification or intentional minimization of such acts of violence or demonstrating the cruel or inhuman acts in a manner injuring human dignity.’53 This example is an exception to the widespread marketing of violent films and games to children. Violence is not only films and games for too many children but a part of life. Children committing atrocities have attracted much international attention because the phenomenon seemed to have become institutionalized in the 1990s, especially in Sierra Leone from which Civilian’s 51 story is reproduced in Box 7. A child who was trained to kill following orders at the age of nine is at school three years later, with uncertain prospects. The journalist interviewing him was keen on finding out what the boy felt. He failed. Maybe the boy thinks about violence as films-and-games, maybe he is preventing himself from feeling anything, except when the military comes along and he has a hysterical attack. We must protect young minds, The Independent, 26 November 1993. 52 Judgment in the Nudist Magazine case of 23 March 1971, reproduced from: Kommers, D.P. – The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1989, p. 423–424. 53 Section 131 of the Criminal Code, reproduced from: Harfst, G. and Schmidt, O.A. – German Criminal Law, 1989. Right to Education Primers No. 3 39