Don't Say Rape: How the Book Banning Movement Is Censoring Sexual Violence (trigger warning)

Don’t Say Rape: How the Book Banning Movement Is Censoring Sexual Violence (trigger warning)
3/4/2024 by Sam LaFrance and Kasey Meehan
The erasure of books on sexual abuse is striking amid an epidemic of sexual violence.



Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Ma.) holds a copy of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison during a news conference to announce a bicameral resolution recognizing Banned Books Week outside the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 27, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

In 2021, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey found that more than one in 10 teenage girls reported having been raped—an estimated one million girls nationwide. That same year, book bans in public school districts across the country took off with unprecedented magnitude and coordination. During that school year, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans recorded 2,532 instances of book bans across 32 states and 138 public school districts. In the next school year, from July 1, 2022, to June 31, 2023, a quarter of over 3,000 book bans that PEN America recorded were books with scenes of rape or sexual assault. Of the 12 most frequently banned titles, five contained scenes of rape or sexual assault: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, Sold by Patricia McCormick, and Identical by Ellen Hopkins.

The erasure of books on sexual abuse is striking amid an epidemic of sexual violence. The book-banning movement is efficiently eradicating an already narrow space to learn about sexual violence in public schools. A book about sexual assault may certainly be triggering to some readers, or just plain difficult for others. But to make them unavailable for all students—when districts serve students who range in age from 5 to 18—is to cut off a lifeline and put students at further risk. These books aren’t harmful—censorship is. Locally, school boards across the country have excised curriculum about consent and healthy relationships. Nationally, increased rhetoric about “porn in schools”—rhetoric that continues to falsely conflate depictions of nudity, sexual experiences, sexuality, gender and rape with “porn”—has placed extreme pressure on schools and libraries.


In Idaho, for example, the West Ada School District banned The Nowhere Girls, a young adult novel that challenges and examines rape culture, because a community member called it “vulgar and obscene.” The same district went on to ban several more books about sexual violence, believing them to be inappropriate—including poetry by Rupi Kaur that offers a personal account of the trauma of sexual assault and Jaycee Dugard’s memoir about her own kidnapping and rape. If West Ada follows statewide trends, about one in 10 girls in the district have already been raped; while banning these books, the committee did not comment on the vulgarity or obscenity of the real rapes occurring in their state—only the ones in print.

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Access to information is crucial to addressing sexual violence and improving sexual health. Banning such information, from the curriculum or from the shelf, ignores the realities faced by students. There is strong evidence that comprehensive sex education protects teens from abuse, unwanted pregnancy, and disease. Similarly, allowing students to read and learn about sexual violence doesn’t cause more violence. In fact, the opposite is true: Allowing students to learn about rape can help prevent it, and it can help those who have experienced it learn how to talk about it. Rape cannot be censored away in the real world. It shouldn’t be censored in our libraries either.

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Students deserve to see themselves in books and to cultivate empathy for the experiences of others. Books like Speak and The Nowhere Girls elevate the voices of young women and girls, and they help teach others about the traumatic realities of violence against women. Rape cannot be censored away in the real world. It shouldn’t be censored in our libraries either.


https://msmagazine.com/2024/03/04/book-bans-censorship-rape-porn/