Book banning is rife across the United States of America. The books targeted in bans often include LGBTQ+, race, and feminist titles, and across other US states, similar laws are in place. In Texas and Florida, hundreds of books are now banned statewide. The literature is often targeted by religious, right-wing individuals and parenting organisations.
Last week, the state of Utah banned 13 books, the first state-wide banning of its kind in the state. These 13 titles include Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses series, Rupi Kaur’s collection Milk and Honey, and Margaret Atwood’s Onyx and Crake. They have been banned statewide as a result of a new law that requires all of Utah’s public (state) school districts to remove books if they are banned in either three (of the forty-one) school districts, or two school districts and five chartered schools. Individually, books can be banned in Utah under House Bill 29, which evaluates and removes ‘instructional material’ that contain pornographic or indecent content. The ‘instructional materials’ are defined as materials, regardless of formats, that are used for teaching in the place of textbooks to deliver the state-mandated curriculum. In the vagueness of this definition, all fiction can fall into the definition of an ‘instructional material’ that can be used in place of the textbook.
In Utah, parents are able to request the ban of books that contain pornographic or indecent content. Ironically for the religious-led protests against fiction, in 2023 in the same state, the King James I Bible was banned from school libraries on the grounds of “vulgarity and violence.” It is no secret that the Bible is filled with sex and death, and yet the Bible was reinstated in libraries after an appeal committee determined the bible had significant and serious value for minors that outweighed the violent or vulgar content of the text.
This logic could be applied to every banned book. Every book ever written has the capacity to have more significant value than the supposed violence and vulgarity they contain, whether they are fiction or non-fiction. However, with the Bible, unlike many of the books which have been banned, we are given the mysterious ability to be able to pick and choose what ‘valuable’ stories we would like to teach.
The fact books are being banned because of pornographic or indecent content is hypocrisy at its finest. Book banning has little, if nothing at all, to do with either pornographic or indecent content. Book banning is all about power. It is the removal of art by government bodies to exercise their power over freedom of speech and also the freedom to read. A book is actually one the safest places to learn about sex, but most young people in modern day America and across the world are actually learning about ‘pornographic and indecent material’ online. Somewhere like X, formerly known as Twitter, where you can make an account without having to truly verify your age, has exhaustive access to pornography that is not just a few sentences in a book. X also has access to all manner of hate speech that has very recently in the United Kingdom been shown to cause violence, notably during the far-right riots which have terrorised many areas of the country in the past few weeks.
In the UK in January of 2023, Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza wrote a report on young people and pornography. The findings showed that the average age at which children first see pornography is 13, with 37% of the focus groups of this report accessing it before then. 79% of the groups had accessed violent pornography before 18, pornography that depicted coercive, degrading, or pain-inducing sex acts. In this report, they found that frequent users of pornography were more likely to engage in physically aggressive sexual acts. The report also found that X was the online platform where young people were most likely to have seen pornography.
Age filters are a false attempt to protect young people from pornography because they are so easy to bypass. And the rest of the online world is also there for the taking. Even with the Internet Safety Act (2023), pornography that is not violent or degrading cannot be truly considered harmful in the sense that the Act describes – the Act has nothing to say about the impacts of porn as harmful to the young people that watch it.
Of the focus groups in de Souza’s study, 64% of the young people had seen online pornography. In America, the numbers are similar, a study found that of 1000 adolescents, 66% of males and 39% of females had watched online pornography, with this rising in Germany, up to 93% of males and 52% of females between the ages to 16-19 have watched pornographic material online. It would be mind-blowing if 60-90% if these same young people had also read The Handmaid’s Tale or A Court of Thorns and Roses series or any of the other books banned on the lists in America and were worse off because of it.
Book bannings have always been a tactic for fascist movements because there is physical outcome: there are now blank spaces on the shelves, and more extreme, burning piles of books in the street. They can ban books because they can, there is nothing stopping them. If we know anything about puritanism and fascism from history, it is that these movements do not care at all if children have a balanced and healthy wellbeing. Saying that book banning protects children is just a cover for trying to silence marginalised voices.
The point of literature, graphic or otherwise, is to learn and read other people’s stories, and in doing so we learn to empathise. If novels are considered ‘instructional materials’, they are instructions into empathy and sympathy and learning about characters in worlds that you yourself do not live in. Book bannings are an attack on self-discovery and self-expression. Young people are not being taught dangerous and harmful material in the classroom; they are being taught it on the internet.
Without a choice of literature to read, and with the judgement of adults over them, children and young people will be put off reading entirely and find other places for pleasure and entertainment. Without stories to reflect upon themselves, young people, especially young boys, look to the internet for purpose. Art is the place people go to discover themselves; it has never been the place where people go to incite violence or access pornography. Right now, as you read this, X, and the internet is.
