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I had my first censorship request in a while this week.
It was not a pressure group waving signs, or someone thundering about porn and filth in the library.
It was a grownup. Whose child had gone wandering, as children are wont to do, and come up to the adult graphic novel section, right next to the teen graphic novel section, and had pulled some books off the shelf and presumably seen things that she did not want to see (or that the grownup did not want the child to see.)
I did what I was supposed to. I spoke honestly and with candor, and with complete accuracy, threw the shelving standardization project under the bus that had dictated to us that we could not place the adult graphic novels in with the adult fiction and nonfiction, which would keep them farther away from curious younglings. I apologized, but also mentioned that the sections were properly marked for their audiences, while also cheerfully agreeing that children of that age won't necessarily read the signs that are there. (Because they won't.)
When the grownup asked whether or not we could just not buy such things, I mentioned that we'd then get complaints from other people that we weren't buying the material they were interested in reading, and we were supposed to have a collection that reflected a wide range of interests and things that people wanted to read. That ended the first round.
The second round came back with "Couldn't you lock that material up?" And I explained that a decision like that might come with possible legal consequences for us, but even putting that aside, we've known that if we place restrictions on access to materials, they don't get used as much, and that very few people are going to be the kind of people who come up to us and ask if we will unlock the books for them, or risk everyone else around saying, "Oh, that person asked the librarian to open the dirty books, they must be a real pervert," when all they want is to read their Batman comics.
I didn't mention the part where the teen comics section, especially in the manga section, sometimes really reflects the differences of cultural expectations and what an audience is likely to see at that age between the United States and other countries. I still recall when the manga series Emma was in the YA section, someone had drawn little angry faces during the parts of the story that happened while Emma was getting dressed or helping dress others, and you could see breasts. They'd covered the breasts with paper and the angry faces and some amount of strong adhesive that didn't allow for removal. I laughed at the effort put into it, even as I was annoyed that someone had done it.
The ultimate result from the conversation was that the grownup said they were going to pay more attention to what their child was doing and where they were. Which is the correct answer and the only real result that someone can get in this situation. Our selectors don't buy obscene books, our audience reads all kinds of books, including those for adult audiences, which are properly filed in the right sections, and we are supposed to carry materials that we think our audience will want to read. We can't single specific sections or materials out for special treatment or place them in some form of restricted section that requires additional burdens to access.
This was all cordial and understanding and empathetic, and the coworker who sent a kudos afterward about handling the situation mentioned that it was a kind and empathetic handling of the situation. I get it - kids will say and do the damnedest things, and sometimes that means they put their grownups in positions they would rather not be in at that age or that time. And the responsibility of being a grownup is to help them with those situations and to get them through it all, and sometimes that means you have to modify your own behavior to make that work. I didn't bend, and I did my best to explain, and this time around, it seems to have worked, which is nice.
But it was still a censorship attempt, and I think that plenty of library school training and the high-profile censorship campaigns being waged by politicians and administrations wants to paint what a typical censorship request looks like, and that it's a lot more sound and fury and public comment to boards and elected officials. And it can be those things, too, when someone gets a bee in their bonnet or otherwise decides that they've not been heard enough, or that the fury of a righteous God means they don't have to give a rat's ass about talking to the people they've decided are degenerates. But more often than not, the censorship request that someone gets is a parent, concerned about their child having found something that wasn't for them, and then asking if there's some way we can just not have that situation happen for their kid again, or not carry anything that might be inappropriate for the child to discover. It's eminently reasonable as a request, and it draws an empathetic response. And sometimes it's not a parent, but your boss who wants you to do this eminently reasonable thing. They're not asking for much, and they're asking, rather than demanding or calling you Satan incarnate. But you still have to say no, for all the other reasons that you would say no to everyone who wants to censor the collection.
And gods willing, I won't have to deal with this again for some time.
It was not a pressure group waving signs, or someone thundering about porn and filth in the library.
It was a grownup. Whose child had gone wandering, as children are wont to do, and come up to the adult graphic novel section, right next to the teen graphic novel section, and had pulled some books off the shelf and presumably seen things that she did not want to see (or that the grownup did not want the child to see.)
I did what I was supposed to. I spoke honestly and with candor, and with complete accuracy, threw the shelving standardization project under the bus that had dictated to us that we could not place the adult graphic novels in with the adult fiction and nonfiction, which would keep them farther away from curious younglings. I apologized, but also mentioned that the sections were properly marked for their audiences, while also cheerfully agreeing that children of that age won't necessarily read the signs that are there. (Because they won't.)
When the grownup asked whether or not we could just not buy such things, I mentioned that we'd then get complaints from other people that we weren't buying the material they were interested in reading, and we were supposed to have a collection that reflected a wide range of interests and things that people wanted to read. That ended the first round.
The second round came back with "Couldn't you lock that material up?" And I explained that a decision like that might come with possible legal consequences for us, but even putting that aside, we've known that if we place restrictions on access to materials, they don't get used as much, and that very few people are going to be the kind of people who come up to us and ask if we will unlock the books for them, or risk everyone else around saying, "Oh, that person asked the librarian to open the dirty books, they must be a real pervert," when all they want is to read their Batman comics.
I didn't mention the part where the teen comics section, especially in the manga section, sometimes really reflects the differences of cultural expectations and what an audience is likely to see at that age between the United States and other countries. I still recall when the manga series Emma was in the YA section, someone had drawn little angry faces during the parts of the story that happened while Emma was getting dressed or helping dress others, and you could see breasts. They'd covered the breasts with paper and the angry faces and some amount of strong adhesive that didn't allow for removal. I laughed at the effort put into it, even as I was annoyed that someone had done it.
The ultimate result from the conversation was that the grownup said they were going to pay more attention to what their child was doing and where they were. Which is the correct answer and the only real result that someone can get in this situation. Our selectors don't buy obscene books, our audience reads all kinds of books, including those for adult audiences, which are properly filed in the right sections, and we are supposed to carry materials that we think our audience will want to read. We can't single specific sections or materials out for special treatment or place them in some form of restricted section that requires additional burdens to access.
This was all cordial and understanding and empathetic, and the coworker who sent a kudos afterward about handling the situation mentioned that it was a kind and empathetic handling of the situation. I get it - kids will say and do the damnedest things, and sometimes that means they put their grownups in positions they would rather not be in at that age or that time. And the responsibility of being a grownup is to help them with those situations and to get them through it all, and sometimes that means you have to modify your own behavior to make that work. I didn't bend, and I did my best to explain, and this time around, it seems to have worked, which is nice.
But it was still a censorship attempt, and I think that plenty of library school training and the high-profile censorship campaigns being waged by politicians and administrations wants to paint what a typical censorship request looks like, and that it's a lot more sound and fury and public comment to boards and elected officials. And it can be those things, too, when someone gets a bee in their bonnet or otherwise decides that they've not been heard enough, or that the fury of a righteous God means they don't have to give a rat's ass about talking to the people they've decided are degenerates. But more often than not, the censorship request that someone gets is a parent, concerned about their child having found something that wasn't for them, and then asking if there's some way we can just not have that situation happen for their kid again, or not carry anything that might be inappropriate for the child to discover. It's eminently reasonable as a request, and it draws an empathetic response. And sometimes it's not a parent, but your boss who wants you to do this eminently reasonable thing. They're not asking for much, and they're asking, rather than demanding or calling you Satan incarnate. But you still have to say no, for all the other reasons that you would say no to everyone who wants to censor the collection.
And gods willing, I won't have to deal with this again for some time.
