Books about sexual assault aren’t pornographic. Schools are banning them as ‘obscene’ anyway

The latest censorship target disproportionately affects women and nonbinary authors—and can prevent survivors from accessing materials that reflect their lives.

By Nadra Nittle, The 19th

A new trend is emerging in book banning: School officials are pulling works about sexual violence from library shelves, often by labeling them “obscene.” That’s the finding of a report released Tuesday by freedom of expression advocacy group PEN America.

Nineteen percent of banned books during the 2021-2023 school years included passages about sexual assault, the report found. What’s more, school officials are banning books at a faster pace. PEN recorded 4,349 book bans in 23 states and 52 public school districts during the first half of the current school year. That figure tops the 3,362 books banned during the entire previous school year.

Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said that after noticing a pattern of policymakers generalizing broadly to label books “sexually explicit,” the organization decided to investigate. “When we dug a little bit deeper, what stood out to us was, ‘Oh, wow, these are stories about violence against women,’” she said. “These are stories told from female survivors.”