Censorship in Young Adult Fiction

The following was a fairly rushed response to this rather infuriating Wall Street Journal article that criticizes the content of modern young-adult fiction.

What those in favor of censorship (or as this woman defines it, "judgment" - *eye roll*) always fail to realize is that a book can contain any assortment of questionable content -- rape, violence, torture -- and advocate the exact opposite. That's how fiction and the morals thereof work.

Take The Hunger Games, for example -- popular young adult book series with a plethora of violent scenes. What is the overall theme of the series? A girl -- a young adult -- leading a revolution against the abhorrently unfair practices of murder and torture (and countless other terrible things) by her government. Of course it's going to be violent -- you don't communicate a message in a novel simply by saying, "People were killed." If you want to open up someone's eyes, if you want to write good fiction, you have to show them the gruesome realities of it.

I like how this article often cites examples of fictional rapes, abuse, and self-harm as though those are bad things that for some reason should be swept under the rug, which I feel is really offensive to teenagers who have had personal experiences with rape, abuse, self-harm, or anything that you might consider offensive. Those are things that some teenagers have to deal with. Just because they aren't your run-of-the-mill, stereotypical high school problems does not mean whatsoever that they aren't being faced by thousands upon thousands of teenagers. And for those teenagers who aren't facing those problems, it opens up their eyes to the realities for other people, making them more apt to relate and respond to their peers' likely experience of these "dark" thoughts, feelings, and situations.

This is my message to the author of the aforementioned article: You state, in response to claims that the content of young-adult fiction is nothing compared to what can be found on the Internet, that, "If young people are encountering ghastly things on the Internet, that's a failure of the adults around them, not an excuse for more envelope-pushing."

Let's just mull over that statement for a moment. There are ghastly things on the Internet. There are ghastly things in young-adult fiction. First of all, what you fail to overlook on both of these counts is the context. I challenge you to find a YA novel that's purpose is to promote violence, rape, self-harm, or abuse. Second of all, you seemed to have missed the point entirely. There is questionable on the Internet. Whose responsibility is it to monitor what web sites children or teenagers view? Their parents. There is questionable content in young-adult fiction. Whose responsibility is it to monitor what books children or teenagers read? Their parents. Not some school-wide, district-wide, or county-wide decision to (most likely, unfairly) censor or "judge" books. If parents don't approve of what their kids are reading, then their parents can stop them. Not an arbitrary decision made by an adult who likely didn't even read the entire book.

I would also like to point out that if children or teenagers are seeking the thrills of violence or sex, they aren't going to look in the young-adult section. You don't have teenagers hiding stacks of YA novels under their bed to keep them out of view from their parents. And I have a strong feeling that any teenagers who commit violence or acts of assault probably did not get their ideas from a YA book. If you're going to attack the messages that teenagers are sent from works of the media, please direct your attention to something worth getting upset over -- things that are racist, homophobic, or misogynistic.

And for the record, teenagers don't have "misery" forced into their lives by YA novels. Teenagers can be brought out of misery by YA novels. Not that you asked, but I have a feeling that because of this article, you are going to receive a lot of response from the actual readers of YA, who should be the real focus of this discussion, but for some reason, were not invited to share their opinions.