Books on the Index | Children’s books most targeted

The rise of banned books in some US states is particularly affecting children’s books written by authors of colour, a study reveals. The researchers also found that these blacklistings are part of a political context in counties where the Republican majority is crumbling.

“We were surprised by our results,” says Katie Spoon, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder who is the lead author of the study published this summer in the journal PNAS. “I expected, for example, that the bans would mainly target romance novels with characters from ethnic or sexual minorities. But there weren’t many of them. The category of books most often targeted is children’s books.”

The majority of these children’s books considered sulphurous are written by authors from ethnic minorities (39%) and sexual minorities (19%). “Often, they are informational works, for example about female programmers from ethnic minorities.”

The analysis looked at more than 1,500 books banned from public libraries in 2022-23, a list compiled by the American section of PEN, an international writers’ group that defends freedom of expression.

The bans occurred in counties with small Republican majorities. Counties without bans were either Democratic or overwhelmingly Republican. Conservative books, including the Bible, were less than 5 percent of the banned books. So left-wing bans are very much in the minority.

Two other surprises from the study concern immigration and the education level of the activists who organize the library bans. “We thought that counties with a lot of immigration would be more likely to have bans,” says M.^me Spoon. And also that they would be found mostly in counties with many educated, well-off white women from traditional, male-only families, because they would have the knowledge and time to do the legwork. But both of these assumptions have not been borne out.”

“Streisand Effect”

The researchers also looked at the impact of the bans on sales. “We thought there would be a ‘Streisand effect,'” says M^me Spoon: For example, that left-wing bookstores would display books banned from certain public libraries to promote them.

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon named after singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s failed 2003 attempt to remove a photo of her mansion from a public database detailing erosion on the California coast.

But there is no Streisand effect for the books targeted by the bans, M.^me Spoon. The only exception is a modest uptick in interest in Google searches for the book. Gender Queer: A Memoirby comic book artist Maia Kobabe. “But you can’t separate the effect of the book’s ban from libraries from the effect of media coverage of the book after the ban.”

The next step in this area of ​​research is to see what effect book bans have on ethnic and sexual minorities. “Studies have suggested that there may be negative effects for these populations. For example, they may feel targeted by association, or they may suffer from a lack of books that represent their experience. But we don’t have data on that.”