Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Correction:

Statistics
TB — (archived)

I can't tell from the ALA statistics how serious the problem is. A "challenge" can apparently range from "An inquiry that has judgmental overtones" to public attacks and censorship.

I spent some time on the statistics pages.

The "since 1999" portion of the listings at the bottom is a bit misleading. The number of challenges in 1994 and 1995 were almost double what they were in 2005.

Most challenges seem to have been to publicly-funded libraries (school and public), and most pertained to sexual explicity, language, violence, and "unsuited to age group." These are normal concerns for parents* when dealing with public institutions where children may have unsupervised access to reading material, particularly school libraries. A parent can't accompany a child to a school library on a routine basis.

Combined, these four issues added up to 2,434 challenges in 2005. By comparison, the "hot button" items like homosexuality, racism, and occultism that make all the newspapers between them added up to 501.

This does not mean I support removing things from the library that a few parents don't like, particularly public libraries where parents can supervise when they want to (parents who dump their kids there have no right to complain). But I do understand the concerns.

* Parents generate a vast majority of the complaints--60 percent--compared to three percent generated by religious groups, politicians, pressure groups, and clergy combined in 2002-2005. Those would be the "Mormons, gay rights groups, white supremicists, Holocaust deniers, and gay bashers" you mentioned. Unless we are just talking individual parents, of course.

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