Book Banning is EVIL.

So recently, there has been a wave of attempts by certain people to stop teenagers from reading books which handle certain subjects in a certain way. Any book which admits the existence of gay people, vaguely describes any sexual act, contains any sort of violence, or makes the slightest allusion to magic or vampires or any sort of supernatural phenomenon, is in the potential firing line.

Of course, you already know this. It was all over the news when religious groups started frothing that JK Rowling was going to turn our children into Satanists, and parents who flail their arms around whenever a book contains the word "penis" tend to crop up everywhere.

But, it's important to stress how hurtful, ignorant and just plain silly all book-banning attempts are. So, that's what I'm going to do.

Groups and individuals who promote the idea of forcing certain books off shelves and out of classrooms like to encourage an idea of teenagers as brainless drones who will uncritically absorb and mimic everything they are told in literature. The justification of one school/district/whatever for banning John Green's Looking for Alaska, a book which amongst various other things includes characters smoking and one sex scene, was that reading about sex and smoking would inevitably make teenagers want to light up and get down themselves. The spokeswoman actually used the phrase "mokey see, monkey do" in her explanation.
Not to mention the crowning jewel for the book banning movement, the recently viral Darkness Too Visible article from the Wall Street Journal. This article cries that teenagers need to be deliberately surrounded by "images of joy and beauty" in order to develop property, and unless subjects like self-harm and abuse are censored from them, they will never be capable of happiness (or something). Also, we hear once again that allowing teenagers to read books about self-harm will cause the behaviour to spread; a conclusion which, frankly, the writer wouldn't have come anywhere near if she had any first-hand or professional understanding of the nature of self-harm.

Here's the thing: teenagers aren't robots. Every single individual between the ages of twelve and eighteen has an independent brain capable of critically analysing input, more or less as effectively as an adult's. As such, it is ludicrous to argue that a teenager's response to reading about an activity will be to unquestioningly mimic it. Hell, not even the average five-year-old reacts to a book like that. No reader expects a novel to be an uncomplicated demonstration of desirable behaviour, and rare is the author who intends it to be. John Green doesn't want his readers to engage in emotionally empty oral sex, JK Rowling doesn't want hers to try and magically inflate their aunts (or, for that matter, don a black cloak and start murdering Mudbloods). And teeage readers get that; they get it because all humans know, from the moment they finish their first book, that that's not what reading is for.

But book-banning isn't just insufferably patronising. It's both a symptom and a weapon of a much greater evil, one which is made more apparent by some of the crazier banning going down in places like Arizona.
A few months ago, following the suspension of a school's programme on Mexican-American studies, a number of books relating to the course were confiscated from teachers and students. Essentially, the school systematically denied students any possibility of reading about Latino issues from the perspective of a Latino writer. Now, imagine being a Mexican-American student in that school; being implicitly told by the people in charge of your education that the voice of your community must be silenced. The word "alienation" doesn't quite seem to cover it.
It's a similar case with the Darkness Too Visible writer's complaint that novels about self-harm "normalise" (God, how I hate that word) self-destructive behaviour. By necessity, then, what the writer wants is for issues like self-harm and suicide to be sidelined, and for teachers and writers to reinforce the idea that people going through such difficulties are "weird". Which, you know, is the exact opposite of what people need when they're suffering from depression.
We see the same pattern with banners who want to pretend to teenagers that sexual abuse doesn't happen, that gay people don't exist, that drug abuse is a fantasy. What this does is prescribe to teenagers that there is only one acceptable way to be: that if you are gay or trans or mentally ill then you are an unacceptable deviation from normality, and if you have been abused or fallen into drug addiction then you are fundamentally Other and can't ever expect anyone to empathise with you. For the privileged white heteronormative mentally healthy majority, their opportunity of learning about and trying to understand other ways of being will be largely denied to them. As such, the social divisions between majority and deviant, which already cause so much suffering in this world, will grow wider and deeper with each generation.

Adolescence is the time when we grow from child to adult. Hiding all dark and diverse things from adolescents stunts that process, because the primary difference between a child and an adult is the amount of experience they have internalized. Censoring potential input for young people, literary or otherwise, helps no-one; least of all those it is intended to protect.