Recently, some agents and publishers for YA books received an email from a website called YA Book Ratings. The site’s admins asked them to rate their books on a ‘cleanliness’ scale and purchase stickers printed with the ratings to put on their books. The backlash from the writing community was brief but nasty, and the site went down like an inflatable boat with cactus passengers. It has since gone up again, but without the pages of ratings.
My initial reaction was, “There’s already Goodreads and StoryOrigin, plus tons of bloggers. Why do we need yet another rating system?” And, “If I was a teenager and a book got on the clean list, I’d know those books are boring.” Gimme your dirty, edgy, profane! Gimme the books you hide under your mattress and read with a flashlight! It wasn’t immediately obvious why people raged about the cleanliness ratings until I began to think more about it.
There’s a difference between what administrators of YA Book Ratings intended, what ratings actually do, and how this impacts children, teenagers, and adults.
Here’s why I think the site administrators thought a ratings system would be a good idea. In the same spirit as the Motion Picture Association film rating system (MPA), they wanted to create a system which categorizes books by content for parents to make age-appropriate decisions. But what’s age-appropriate? Roughly agreed-upon norms by parents, society, and authorities in education, childhood development, etc, about what’s best for a child at whatever age. Will the contents of this film, book, game, etc overwhelm, frighten, or traumatize my child? If yes, maybe it’s best to keep the kiddos innocent just a little while longer and not let them see Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
According to Center Montessori’s director, Janice Mattina, children need to have innocence. It’s a tool for “dealing with the uncertainty and insecurity of life when one is rather helpless.”
“Even we adults, who think of ourselves as rational, can feel helpless, vulnerable, powerless, and frightened when we don’t know how to deal with the uncertainty of some events in our lives. […] But as adults, we are separated from children by the number of years we’ve been alive and by how we’ve transformed those years into meaningful life experiences which hopefully have given us some degree of wisdom. Therefore, when something unexpected happens in our lives, we use our past experiences to make sense of it and to guide us as to what to do next.
Children, on the other hand, don’t have this bevy of experiences from which to derive a sense of power or security. What children have instead is a sense of innocence. With that innocence comes trust. Since children can’t solve the adult world’s problems, they trust that we adults will.”
https://www.centermontessori.org/writings-by-janice/childhood-innocence
In this light, ratings guide parents in evaluating whether their child can handle the experiences in certain media. I don’t disagree that parents should decide what content their kids should consume. Though it’s probably futile to stop a determined teenager from getting around the controls.
But consider the popular YA book, The Hate U Give. The book follows Starr, a young Black teenager caught between worlds: the wealthy prep school she attends and her inner city neighborhood. The book follows her as she grapples with the aftermath of a police shooting that killed her best friend before her eyes. Starr is given the chance to speak out about what happened, but she’s frightened by her family being ostracized, fired, and even killed.
According to BannedBookWeeks.org, The Hate U Give was banned by school officials in Katy, Texas for “pervasive vulgarity and racially-insensitive language”. After students rallied to return it to the shelves, the officials removed the ban. But students need parent permission to check out the book from the school library.
Being banned and challenged is more extreme than slapping a sticker with a rating on the cover. But just like the ban by the school officials in Katy, the YA Book Ratings system is based on violence, sex, drugs and alcohol, and strong language. The link between ratings and bannings is that both control the experiences children and teenagers can have through books.
Reading about drugs, sex, strong language, and other “problematic things” does not mean that the reader will jump out of their chair and go do drugs, sex, and start swearing. But this is beside the point. Ratings and bans come from the same spirit. They’re judgements. Moreover, they’re public judgements based on how the rater or banner believes other people should interact with what was rated. Otherwise, why publicize a rating?
In the case of The Hate U Give, the district superintendent who pulled the book did so in violation of his district’s own review policy. The Fraternal Order of Police in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina lodged a complaint against the book for being anti-police.
The author, Angie Thomas, gave an interview with Entertainment about her book.
“There are so many misunderstandings. There’s the assumption that it’s an antipolice book, when the fact is it’s anti-police brutality.” She continues, in regard to the language: “There are books with way more curse words in them, for one. And two, there are 89 F-bombs in The Hate U Give. But there were 800 people killed by police officers last year alone.”
https://ew.com/books/2018/09/26/angie-thomas-banned-books-week/
The book is about many things: racial justice, classism, coming-of-age. But at its core, it’s about finding the courage to do the right thing when the right thing to do isn’t obvious or safe. Banning the book for racially-insensitive language misses the point of the story. But the ban was never about the language anyway. Ratings and bans don’t just police language, drugs, and sex. They police viewpoints, behavior, and beliefs. Of the American Library Association’s top ten most challenged books, in 2019, 8 of the 10 books were banned for LGBTQIA+ content. In 2020, 3 books were for anti-police messages. Books with racist or sexual content are perennial favorites of challengers, as are those with political and religious viewpoints.
The experiences in these books can clarify things teenagers have always known to be true, but could not articulate to themselves. For those who have already experienced what is in those books, not seeing their experiences reflected is like being invisible. How do you move forward when your innocence is lost? How do you live when you never got to be innocent? How can teenagers answer the question, “Who and how will I be?” unless they have books that show the consequences for choosing one path or the other?
Why ban a book unless you were afraid of the adults the children would become?
Adults who practice different religions. Adults of different colors. Adults who love people of the same gender, or who change their gender. Why are their experiences deemed inappropriate?
Nobody who grows and learns as a person is innocent forever. And who wants to be innocent forever? Permanent innocence means unfailingly not knowing what needs to be known. And, by extension, what needs to be done to make the world a better place.
So when I hear, “How am I supposed to explain to my child [whatever]?” I think, for God’s sake. Google it! Think about it! Talk with other people about it! Give them another book. Books are the safest way to experience difficult, complicated, and bad things. Because the other way to experience bad things is to have them happen to your kid, or their friends, or their family. And by then it’s too late to stop it, or to know what to do about it.
Encourage them to read what they want, and teach them how to think critically about them. Don’t ban a book because you don’t want to have a conversation with your kid. And don’t sign up for these book ratings either.
The site admins of YA Book Ratings clearly love books. Otherwise, why bother to cook up a ratings system? But also, how could they fail to imagine that the book community might not be big fans? Unless they read such a narrow selection of literature that they could not imagine.