Challenging My Assumptions About Challenges

I think many, maybe most, librarians have a knee-jerk response when we hear about a book challenge. "Ooh! Bad! Censorship!" The challenges that make the news are so often the result of a single parent/guardian's complaint about a book they may or may not have read in its entirety. That one person makes enough noise for an army, and the book goes—unless other folks who feel differently stand up for the book and justify its presence on the shelf.

In other words, the greatest problem is not challenge. The greatest problem is silence. Lack of debate. Complacence. And it happens all too often.

Now, if we librarians address all book challenges with the assumption that the challenger is wrong, what's the point of having a challenge process at all? Why don't we just have a rule that says, "The library is always right, and we don't have to listen to you, nyah nyah nyah"?

Oh, right. Because we're here to serve the public, in all its many stripes and spots.

I believe habeas corpus should apply to books as well as people; books should be considered innocent until proven guilty. But we should remain open to the possibility that, once all evidence has been carefully considered, with witnesses called on either side, the book is "guilty."

As a public librarian, I have a hard time just thinking about this, much less writing it. Every community is diverse on so many dimensions, it's hard to imagine a book that doesn't serve someone in that community's needs, thereby justifying its presence (assuming it meets that library's collection development standards). In that way, I think public libraries have it easy when it comes to deflecting book challenges.

But I'm also a children's librarian, and I experience first-hand the judgment calls that go into our collection's development. It's not just a matter of literary quality or balanced viewpoints. There's the whole age thing. My department serves children from birth to eighth grade, so there's an upper age limit on what we buy. Within that, we decide whether books go in the picture book area versus juvenile fiction, juvenile versus youth.

All the while, we're well aware that some children are "reading up" while others are "reading down." We know middle schoolers are reading Stephen King, V.C. Andrews, and Piers Anthony. (OK, that's actually what I was reading in middle school, but things haven't changed much since then.) But are we buying Stephen King, V.C. Andrews, and Piers Anthony for our collection? No.

There's something vaguely hypocritical about that. We tout the freedom to read, for readers of all ages, yet we're constantly deciding what's "age appropriate," based on book reviews and our personal views. Meanwhile, the book reviews' age recommendations are based on the reviewers' personal views.

Where do these views on "age appropriateness" come from? They come from somewhere. If you read a few reviews of a children's book, you'll see variation in the age recommendations, but there's generally consensus within a couple of grade levels. There's the complexity of the text, syntactically and thematically, and the maturity of the subject matter. But still, how do we decide what's right for what age group?

I guess it's just social/cultural norms. With some bell curve-style variation, we've decided that X is appropriate for 6th but not 3rd graders, 9th but not 6th.

"Ah!" you may say. "But isn't it true that those 'mature' books would simply be of no interest to a younger audience?" Sure it is... sometimes. But that reasoning doesn't work for Stephen King, V.C. Andrews, or Piers Anthony. They were all well within my reading ability as a sixth grader. And boy oh boy, were they interesting!

Yet they weren't in the youth collection of my hometown library, and they're not in the youth collection of my library here. Social/cultural norms at work.

This is all to say that (A) librarians make decisions about "age appropriateness" in the collection all the time and (B) their decisions are ultimately based on personal discretion. Most librarians are making determinations around the center of that bell curve. But who's to say that, just as a book challenger might be down the cautious tail of the curve, a librarian might not make a purchase down the more daring tail—to the point of breaking out of the social/cultural norms and becoming an outlier?

I bet it doesn't happen often. But could it? Yes, I think so, whether due to negligence, an honest mistake, or a difference in world-view. And I believe that's a time when a book, if it were challenged, could be found "guilty."

In a public library, we don't have to worry much about this. It's easy to bump a book from the children's to the youth section, or from youth to high school. Schools, though—things are trickier with schools. There's the whole curriculum thing. The in loco parentis thing. The closed system thing. A book is in the library, or it's not.

When parents/guardians protest that a book is "not age appropriate" (which, if you check out the websites of most "concerned citizen groups" backing book challenges, you will find is typically their greatest concern), there's no bumping it to the next range of shelves and calling it good. And so it's a lot easier for a book challenge to result in that book's removal from the school.

And again, generally speaking, I think that's the wrong thing to do. The books that get challenged are, so often, books that challenge us. They're opportunities for discussion and personal growth. They're never going to be right for every child, every family, and chances are they're just the right book for someone in that school. But I'm not willing to say the issue is so black and white that book challengers are just plain wrong, just plain ignorant, overprotective censors.

Here are some of the questions I've asked myself this week. I'd love it if you, dear readers, would share your opinions.

• Is it ever right to "submit" to a book challenge, i.e., find a book "guilty"? If so, when?
• Is it ever right to remove a book from the library in response to a challenge? If so, when?
• What about limiting access to it in another way, e.g., putting it in a restricted area where you have to ask staff for it?
• Does it make a difference whether it's a public library or a public school library?
• Does it make a difference whether the book is simply in the school library versus on a required reading list?
• Is the greater problem with book challenges the challenges themselves or the lack of balanced debate that follows?
• Why have children's librarians consistently decided over the past 20 years that it's not appropriate to collect Stephen King, V.C. Andrews, and Piers Anthony, when we know darn well the kids read it anyway?

I'd like to make clear that I'm not in favor of every person who objects to a book's content running out and challenging it. We're better off learning to mind our own business, to live and let live, and to accept that what is right/wrong for us is not right/wrong for the rest of the world.

But I'm not willing to speak in absolutes. And I've always had a tendency to play Devil's Advocate.

Anyway, let it not be said that I don't think things through (and possibly too much).