In a 1981 essay about book censorship, a Time magazine columnist wrote that “modern tyrannies promote the contentment and obedience of their subjects by ruthlessly keeping troubling ideas out of their books and minds.”

Thanks to the First Amendment, the United States government has never officially imposed this kind of intellectual bondage on its citizens, but if you replace “modern tyrannies” with “parents” and “subjects” with “kids,” then you could argue that aspiring censors are actually alive and kicking in the land of the free.

Just look at the numbers. According to the Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF), around 500 challenges are filed against books every year in an attempt to remove them from classrooms and public libraries, mostly by helicopter parents hoping to shelter their children’s virginal minds from words like “damn” and issues like rape.

In response, the OIF started Banned Books Week—an annual celebration of the freedom to read—which this year began on Monday. The initiative was launched in 1982 after the organization noticed a disturbing surge in the number of book-banning attempts, and since then well over 11,000 books have been reported as unsuitable.

Among the most-challenged titles in 2013 were Captain Underpants, a children’s series about two friends and an undergarment-wearing superhero; The Bluest Eye, Nobel Prize winner Tony Morrison’s first novel; and Bless Me, Ultima, the best-selling Chicano novel of all time. Justifications for their censorship (and for the other most challenged books) tend to run the gamut of parental paranoias—offensive language, racism, religious views—but sex won out above all.

Reasons Parents Attempt to Ban Books Based on the top 10 most challenged books from 2009 to 2013, here are parents' primary justifications for seeking censorship Create Infographics How We Know All data is taken from the Office of Intellectual Freedom.

After analyzing data from OIF, Vocativ found that sex was consistently the No. 1 reason why parents deemed a book unfit for public consumption. For the top 10 most banned books from each of the past five years alone, sex was cited 37 times as grounds for complaint. This includes everything from sexual explicitness (Twilight) and nudity (humanities books depicting naked, ancient statues) to sexual education (It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health).

Second on the list was offensive language (in one instance, this included the phrase “poo poo head“), which raked in 32 complaints, compared with just eight for violence and 11 for mentions of drugs and alcohol. (Oh, America, how well you honor your Puritan past.)



Sure, it would be nice to think that this kind of vigilante censorship has become somewhat less common as the 21st century marches onward, but unfortunately that’s not the case.

Last year, the Kids’ Right to Read Project, a group that monitors book censorship, found that the number of challenges to books had increased by 53 percent since 2012. “Whether or not patterns like this are the result of coordination between would-be censors across the country is impossible to say,” KRRP spokesperson Acacia O’Connor said at the time. “But there are moments, when a half-dozen or so challenges regarding race or LGBT content hit within a couple weeks, where you just have to ask, What is going on out there?”

Perhaps the saddest part of all is that children who are denied books that deal with difficult subjects (such as those tackled in the frequently banned To Kill a Mockingbird or The Catcher in the Rye) may also be ill-equipped to deal with reality by the time they leave home.

As the same Time columnist noted, “Censorship can place people in bondage more efficiently than chains.”