The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

The Wanganui Chronicle reports that the controversy over what graphic novels a public library can carry has spread even to New Zealand, with a part-time teacher Julie Gordon (no relation) passing round a petition to call for several graphic novels (which aren’t named, unfortunately) to be removed or censored because of what she considers explicit material. Mrs Gordon has already spent some of her own money taking some of the books which offend her to the censor’s office; her petition to the local council asks: “That the library adopt a similar procedure to local secondary schools by checking graphic novels for offensive/inappropriate content before stocking them. That the library stop carrying graphic comics in the vein of those already rated. That the library adopt a clear, consistent procedure for the public to have books censored should they wish to. That the library take responsibility for books it stocks; if a book needs a rating from the censor’s office, any application fees paid be refunded to the applicant.”

I can’t help but note that nowhere in this article does it say that the offending graphic novels are contained in the children’s section of the library – in fact it notes that many graphic novels are aimed at adult readers. Comparing a public library to a school library also strikes me (as someone who has worked in an academic library) as a very poor comparison, given the different range of users each caters to. Her point seems to be that anyone can take out these works as they have no age restriction on them. The thought that books should be strictly restricted by age makes my blood run cold; long before I worked in a library or bookstore I was looking for more challenging work in my local library and used the adult section regularly (with full approval from my parents who actually took the time to look at what I was taking out) from the age of about ten onwards. It is not the job of librarians to police what books people can and cannot borrow from the library – if parents are concerned their children will go into the adult section and pick up works they don’t want them to see then surely that is a parental responsibility?

This sort of call for censorship has echoes in other media too, from DVDs and computer games to the internet; each time the simple, easy answer given is that we need to censor them to protect the children (picture Maude Flanders “won’t someone, please, think of the children!”). This essentially has a knock-on effect on the freedoms of others by restricting their choice of reading and it cuts into the vital freedom of expression, something we should always be wary of because this kind of thing always leads in the end to ludicrous extremes – recall last year and the offended parent who demanded the school ban Fahrenheit 451, without a single touch of irony (because he hadn’t read it). And again, it seems to me to often be a lazy substitute for parental responsibility – why bother looking into your children’s reading when it is simpler to just tell the library to censor for you?

I’m not arguing for young children to be given access to explicit material; obviously there are some works that are not suitable for much younger eyes. But books outside the children’s section are ipso facto not aimed at young children and therefore it is surely up to the parent to take responsibility for what their children pick up outwith the children’s section, rather than restricting the choice of reading on offer to adults? And who is to judge what needs to be censored or withdrawn? Almost anything can be offensive to some person – I have personal experience of a mother who complained bitterly in a bookstore I used to work in that we should not sell gay and lesbian interest books because “children might see them”. We had a large section purely for children, as most mainstream bookstores do, but apparently the rest of the store had to conform to this woman’s homophobic wishes as well, in the interests of her children. Quite why they were going to that section in the first place she declined to answer, which made me think that some people go looking for books to offend them so they can then call for them to be banned.

Official censorship is a very, very slippy slope and shackling reading choice for a community based on one person’s personal dislikes and values is rarely a good idea. Don’t want your children to pick up the wrong book in the grown-ups section? Then go to the library with them! How’s that for a simple solution? Methinks I detect the stirrings of another manufactured moral panic. And that line from her petition should make any reader worried: “That the library adopt a clear, consistent procedure for the public to have books censored should they wish to.”