Dialogue: Would-be censors of kids' books push own agendas

Those who seek to impose restrictions on the content of children's books hinder, rather than help, the learning process, writes DAVID HILL.

The shortlists for this year's New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards have been announced. The winners are named in Wellington on March 27. Before then, people will be rushing into print, abusing our writers for children and young adults.

It happened last year, with indignant letters about the fact that several finalists in the senior fiction category seemed to acknowledge darker sides of life.

It happened in previous years, when other shortlisted books were accused of promoting lesbianism, or revising New Zealand history, or including slang/swearing/subversion.

It happens frequently to our writers for younger age-groups. One intermittent columnist claims that New Zealand writers for children and teenagers are politically correct trendies, following tedious formulas, and largely responsible for the fact that so many children switch off reading.

The charges from this columnist and those unhappy about NZ Post shortlists boil down to the fact that some local fiction for young readers does mention solo parents, ethnic minorities, sex, violence, loneliness - none of which ever enters the lives of New Zealand children, naturally.

Of course, writing for kids and adolescents brings special responsibilities. You are going to be read by vulnerable, impressionable eyes and minds.

So as well as having to meet literary standards, you are pressured to meet ethical standards - standards which vary wildly, according to which critic/parent/teacher/politician demands them.

Children don't demand; they just want a good story.

Are New Zealand writers for these age groups a bunch of agenda pushers? Should some of their topics and language be kept away from young eyes?

I cannot imagine a better way of destroying a book's chance of audience acceptance than writing it to push an agenda. Start preaching at kids, and they will be off the book and on to the computer before you can say "tedious formulas".

The writers I know do not push agendas. They can't work that way. Writers start with people or situations that intrigue them, and explore what follows. Wrenching the shape to fit an agenda is a perfect recipe for ensuring that nothing follows.

How about taboo topics? I sympathise with those worrying whether certain words and subjects should be in books for younger readers. The writers of these books worry, too. The ones I know take huge pains over how they present their material.

Naturally, adults want to shelter children from viciousness and degradation. They want children's reading to reinforce a happy, healthy adolescence.

But though I fully accept the right of people to object to the content of children's or young adult books, I feel apprehensive when they urge restrictions on material.

For one thing, such people are the real agenda pushers. For another, the call for restrictions fails to recognise the enormous diversity of young readers. Plus, it egotistically assumes that they react to books in the same way the adult critic does.

Those who want such restrictions assume that children inhabit an innocent Eden which all right-thinking adults must defend.

Such an attitude is insulting as well as inaccurate. It's the thinking of a group who hold power - the power of knowledge - over others. Is it the perceived innocence of children that such people want to preserve? Or their ignorance?

Australian writer John Marsden puts it succinctly: "Protection is the oldest form of repression."

Protection in the case of young readers means censorship. And though I have no problem with censorship in the form of selective buying of children's books by parents, I feel deeply uneasy at the sort urged by some who attack children's or young adult writers.

Such people want censorship for all according to standards set by them - standards which they sincerely believe are the only decent, moral ones. It's an attitude that hinders children from learning to discern and choose for themselves.

There are topics I won't ever write about for my readers. There are situations and relationships I won't depict; language I won't use.

That is because I feel unhappy writing about them, which is different from my prohibiting other writers from attempting them, or someone prohibiting me.

Like Voltaire (and it is the only way I am like Voltaire), I may disagree with what these other writers say, but I will defend with bared fillings their right to say it.

* David Hill writes novels, plays and short fiction for children and teenagers.