Banned

     Sunday, September 30th,  marked the start of Banned Books Week, a program sponsored by various groups to celebrate the freedom we have to express and exchange thoughts and ideas through the books in libraries and to highlight the challenges to those freedoms. One of the main groups behind this program is the American Library Association (ALA), a group of people whose goal is to help with the development, promotion, and improvement of libraries across America. The need to have such a program as Banned Books Week may be a surprise to many, as Americans will often decry censorship in it's many forms. The banning taking place in the U.S. is not official government censorship, but voluntary removal of books by libraries themselves due to public request. Since the 80's, there have been thousands of challenges issued that have called for books to be removed from libraries across America. Why are all these challenges being issued, how exactly is a book banned and what books are being called out?

     Most often parents are the ones who start the process to get a book banned, seeking to keep the contents of book from children. While parents wanting to protect their children is understandable, librarians have to keep everyone in mind. What is offensive to one parent may not be to another. It is for that reason that many libraries allow books to stay, even if a complaint has been received against it. The largest number of complaints libraries receive are about books that contain explicit sexual content. In many cases such as this the burden of proof lies not with the book's content, but with the offended party to prove that the book is obscene. This acts as a form of defense for the book as it requires the offended party to spell out what they find offensive about the work instead of just pulling the book straight off the shelf. Once that is done, the book banning process takes over from there.    

      Book banning is not as universal or as centralized as some may think. Anytime a book is banned, that ban applies to only to the library or library network that issued the ban and no others. The first step in a book being banned is for someone to issue a complaint. How this is done will vary on a library to library basis. Some may want a form filled out, while at others it may be as simple as telling the librarian that this book is offensive and needs to go. Once a complaint is filed it is up to the library to decide if the book stays or if it goes. How this is handled all depends on how the library is governed. If the library has a governing board then they will be the ones that have to decide, or if not, it may just be up to the librarian. Often times if the complaint comes into a school library instead of a public one, as is most often the case, then it will be up to a process defined by that school board to decide the books fate. However, just because a book has received a complaint that doesn't mean that the book is banned.

      Many complaints are filed each year, but most of them end up in the books favor and it is allowed to stay in the library. Most of the complaints about books are about obscene content they have, but before many libraries consider a book obscene and ban it, often times they will subject it to the Miller test. This test is named after one of the parties involved in a Supreme court case from back in the 70's. One of the questions brought up by that case was what constitutes obscenity. To answer that question, the court came up with a three question test to see if certain content was obscene. For a work to be considered obscene it must:
* Appeal to prurient interests when taken as a whole
* Involve patently offensive sexual conducts
* Contain no literary, artistic, political or scientific value
It is that last clause that has saved many a book from being banned. While they may have the first two checked off, only if a work can meet all three points is it considered obscene. Many books are sexual in nature, but the ones that have remained unbanned have been proven to have some literary or other value.

     With the process outlined above, what books have been the target of bans? Believe it or not, some of what are considered the classics of English literature have been banned in the past. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was banned because of its coarse language. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne was banned because some thought that it was pornographic. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was banned due to language and sexual reasons. Today, the largest number of books that receive complaints fall into the category of books that are aimed at a Juvenile readership. Modern hits that fall into this category are the Harry Potter series and the Hunger Games series.




1. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=manzo%2C%20kathleen%20kennedy.%20%22challenged.%22%20education%20week&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&ved=0CDAQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fs640if.wikispaces.com%2Ffile%2Fview%2FManzo%2BChallenged.pdf&ei=rmZrUNulIZCArQGV-oHICg&usg=AFQjCNGtXabJwwsVgUowf-UJvVEsIKEcIg
2. http://people.howstuffworks.com/book-banning.htm
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_(literature)
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_United_States
5. http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/
6. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/stats