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The increase includes books about women's sexual experiences, rape, and abuse, in addition to continued attacks on material with LGBTQ+ or racial themes.
More than 10,000 books were banned from public schools in the 2023-2024 academic year, nearly triple the number from the previous year, according to preliminary findings from PEN America, a group that advocates for freedom of expression.
PEN America recorded 3,362 bans nationwide in the 2022-2023. It will release the final count for the 2023-2024 school year later this fall, along with an Index of School Book Bans and a detailed analysis of the content of the banned books. The preliminary results were released Monday as Banned Books Week began.
“In part due to the targeting of sexual content, the stark increase includes books featuring romance, books about women’s sexual experiences, and books about rape or sexual abuse as well as continued attacks on books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, or books about race or racism and featuring characters of color,” says a PEN America press release.
The main forces behind the book-banning movement are state laws and groups and individuals that claim to espouse parental rights as an excuse to remove books from shelves. Iowa and Florida, both of which have laws that enable book bans, accounted for about 8,000 of the book bans in 2023-2024.
Iowa’s law prohibits books with any depiction of a sex act, and this has been interpreted to ban books with any content related to sex or gender, and the law also contains “don’t say gay” language that has been used to ban LGBTQ+ content. The statute went into effect in July 2023, leading to thousands of titles being banned in the 2023-2024 school year, up from just 14 in the previous two academic years combined. Under Florida’s law, which became effective at the same time, any book that is challenged has to be removed while it’s under review, and this “has been linked to a significant rise in book bans during the 2023-2024 school year,” PEN America reports.
New laws in Utah, South Carolina, and Tennessee are likely to lead to increased book bans in the 2024-2025 school year, the group notes.
The list of titles banned in 2023-2024 includes many of those that have been targeted since the beginning of the book-banning movement in 2021, such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, and The Bluest Eye and Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Numerous titles, however, appeared on the banned list for the first time. These include Roots: The Saga of An American Family by Alex Haley, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois, Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, Finding Junie Kim by Ellen Oh, and Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.
“School libraries serve the educational process by making knowledge and ideas available, and ensuring books remain available for all regardless of personal or political ideologies and ideas,” says the PEN America release. “Book bans impede the freedom to read, limiting students’ access to a diversity of views and stories.”
