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.” 

Banning books because they describe sexual violence raises concerns that survivors will be deprived of the chance to read literature that reflects their experiences, ultimately increasing their feelings of alienation instead of aiding with their recovery. About 27 percent of 17-year-old girls and 5 percent of 17-year-old boys say they have experienced sexual abuse — figures that range from 23 to 62 percent for LGBTQ+ youth. 

Roughly half of individuals who contact the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) for help are minors, said Scott Berkowitz, president and founder of the nonprofit that works to combat sexual violence and to support survivors. 

“This is something that’s already very much a part of their lives,” Berkowitz said. “Pretending that sexual violence is just an adult topic might make some people feel better, but kids know the truth.” 

He added that banning books about sexual assault plays into the common misconception that such acts are about sex when they’re really about violence.

In states all over the country — from Idaho to Pennsylvania — books with sexual violence have been banned on the grounds that they’re “pornographic,” “disgusting” or “obscene,” according to the report. Literature targeted for their passages on sexual assault include Amy Reed’s “The Nowhere Girls,” kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard’s memoir, “A Stolen Life,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Rupi Kaur’s poetry collections. Even works on consent haven’t been spared, with one Kentucky school district briefly banning the book “Defining Sexual Consent,” a decision that faced pushback from parents.

“We want to be teaching kids about consent so that they can interact in social situations and know warning signs and things to look for and help protect their friends,” Berkowitz said. “The last thing we want to be doing is hiding this information from kids. Keeping information from kids is… going to actually make things harder for them. It’s going to make them more ashamed to talk about something that happened to them and less aware that there are lots of other people that it also happens to.”

Many survivors blame themselves, but when they realize how common sexual violence is, they piece together that the abuse they suffered had nothing to do with them and everything to do with the perpetrator who decided to harm them, he said. 

Censoring books because they reference sexual assault also disproportionately impacts women and nonbinary writers, groups more likely to engage with this subject matter. In Idaho’s West Ada School District, women authored nine out of the 11 books school officials banned in the fall, and more than half of the works discussed sexual and other forms of violence against women, PEN found. One of those books, “The Nowhere Girls,” Meehan said, “is about teenage girls who are resisting sexist culture in their school and resisting sexual abuse of women.”

Niki Scheppers, the communications chief for the West Ada School District, told The 19th in a statement that the books West Ada removed aren’t children’s literature but “represent works of a more explicit nature.” She also said, “In the careful curation of knowledge, the decision to remove certain books from our library shelves is not made lightly. It is a deliberate choice aimed at fostering an environment that encourages diverse perspectives while ensuring the protection of our students.”

Since First Amendment protections do not cover obscenity, categorizing reading materials as such makes it easier to remove them from school libraries. There’s just one problem: The works targeted don’t meet the legal threshold for obscenity, according to PEN. The group referenced the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Miller v. California which characterized obscene materials as being totally devoid of “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

To skirt this definition, states and school districts have “increasingly introduced new terms” or “manipulat[ed] other existing statutes,” according to PEN. Sometimes, terms such as “sexually explicit,” “sexually relevant” or “sexual conduct” are used to justify removing books, but these phrases don’t have a standard legal meaning, causing confusion among school personnel about which books should be permitted or prohibited. Florida’s HB 1069 singles out any book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct.”  Enacted last year, it has led to the ouster of books such as Melissa Marr’s “Ink Exchange” from school libraries. Marr’s book, however, does not detail the rape that figures heavily in the storyline. 

Florida leads the nation in book banning cases, with 3,135 bans across 11 school districts from July 2021 to December 2023, the PEN America report found. Escambia County Public Schools, the district with the most censorship in the country, enacted more than 1,600 of those bans. Wisconsin came in second, imposing 481 bans in three districts. There, the Elkhorn Area School District alone barred 444 books based on the complaints of one parent, according to PEN. With 142 bans in three districts, Iowa came in third, followed by Texas (141 bans), Kentucky (106 bans) and Virginia (100 bans).

PEN America points to the website Book Looks as a driving force of book bans. Started in 2022 by a former member of Moms for Liberty, a national group focused on parents’ rights in schools, the website ranks books based on their content about gender identity, sexual orientation, race relations, profane language and violence. Supporters of censorship have used the site to challenge books in school districts nationwide. A Maryland Moms for Liberty chapter used the site to suggest the removal of more than 50 books in Carroll County schools, PEN found. Of these books, 96 percent contained sexual references and 36 percent mentioned rape. 

“We are well aware that allowing students to read and learn about sexual violence doesn’t cause more violence,” Meehan said. “In fact, research has shown us that the opposite is true, that students who learn about rape and rape culture can actively work to help prevent it.”

In Brevard County, Florida, school officials in June imposed an eight-year ban on three works by the poet Kaur that reference sexual violence: “Milk and Honey,” “The Sun and Her Flowers” and “Home Body.” She responded to the development by stating on X, “Banning books about sexual assault is not going to stop sexual assault from happening. Lawmakers are taking away tools that help students feel seen and that’s what breaks my heart.”

Meehan said that giving young people access to books about a wide range of topics, including sexual violence, helps to improve their sexual health, just as providing them with comprehensive sexuality education does. Like Kaur, she also acknowledged a grim truth: “Rape and harm against young people and young girls is not being censored away in the real world. So why would we censor it from our libraries?”