writerjenn

I loved YA books when I was growing up, but my only complaint about them was their occasional lack of realism.  Hardly anyone was sexually active, or even seemed to think much about sex.  Of the few who did engage, most of them instantly seemed to get pregnant.  Except for a couple of Sandra Scoppettone books, there were no gay characters.  Drugs were only brought into the picture as a moral lesson: do drugs and you end up dead or insane.  Kids rarely even cursed in these books.  

All of which was a contrast to the real world I saw around me--a world in which kids had keg parties, and used the F word, and complained in the girls' locker room about the side effects of their birth-control pills.  And, mind you, I lived in a nice middle-class suburb.  

It's a relief to me that today's YA books are far more realistic.  And yet, they come under fire from censors and would-be censors for that very reason.  Which always makes me want to say, "Do you think that if you prevent a kid from reading about this situation, that you're preventing him from witnessing--or living--this situation in real life?"  Isn't it better to talk to kids about what they're reading and what they're living and how they feel about it and what they think about it, than just trying to take a book away?  What about kids who've lived through harsh experiences--don't they deserve books with characters who've gone through the same things? 

There's a line between the descriptive and the prescriptive.  Writing about "what is" is not the same as writing as "what should be."  Some of us think that writing about "what is" is one of the best ways to get people talking about "what should be."  

 In honor of Banned Books Week, here are some thoughts on censorship, particularly censorship of books.

I wanted to go a little deeper than "Censorship=Bad" and think about some of the whys & wherefores.  So here I address a couple of issues that may underlie the impulse to censor: CONTROL and PROTECTION.

CONTROL is the desire to regulate not only what we (or our children) read, but what everyone else is allowed to read, too.  The existence of a censor implies that the censor is somehow wiser than the rest of us.
Questions for thought:
Where does the censor's authority come from?
Who gets to be the gatekeeper?
Why should that gatekeeper's tastes, preferences, or religious beliefs trump those of everyone else?
Does it matter whether a censor has even read the book he/she is trying to ban?
If the censor has read it, why can't we?  If the censor hasn't read it, then on what basis is it being censored?

PROTECTION, especially the protection of children, is often cited in censorship cases.  I believe this is often misguided.  How can we prevent children from encountering in books the things that we can't prevent them from encountering in real life?  Through literature, we can read about the things we fear, think about them, see examples of different ways to handle them and the consequences that might result.  We can decide for ourselves which paths we want to take in our own lives.
Questions for thought:
Can censorship itself be more harmful than knowledge?
How does ignorance prepare us for life?

Final questions for thought:
Have you ever seen the title of a book you absolutely loved, a book that changed your life, on a Banned Books list, and thanked your lucky stars that you were able to read that book?