Rating System Reviews Obscene Books in School Libraries

Movies and TV shows have content ratings; why don't books?

The BookLooks rating system for questionable content in children's books. Photo courtesy of BookLooks

Many books currently in school libraries include outright child pornography, the result of a massive gap in the way America protects children, according to a parental rights group.

Unlike movies or TV shows, books have no content rating, according to Emily Maikisch of BookLooks.org. Her website, launched in March, has rated more than 297 books found in U.S. school libraries.

She says she designed the website as a tool for parents, so they could quickly and easily see whether their school libraries include obscene books.

The lack of a book rating system allows every kind of obscenity into school libraries—up to and including graphic descriptions of pedophilia, the BookLooks site has documented.

“Some books are so vivid in detail they transport you into a character’s body to experience everything they experience,” Maikisch told The Epoch Times in a written interview. “When reading a book, no detail is left out. Nothing is missed and every sensation is described. The reader vicariously lives the experience through the character.”

Some books reviewed by BookLooks include “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, which depicts oral sex and nudity; “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Johnson, which deals with child homosexual sexual abuse between cousins; “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, which describes child sex abuse from a pedophile’s perspective; “The Carnival at Bray” by Jessie Ann Foley, which details a graphic sex scene; “Dead End” by Jason Myers, which includes a rape scene; and many others in a similar vein.

Although movies and TV shows have rating systems to protect children from objectionable content, books have no such system. Children's books containing transgender and homosexual content on display at the library in Columbia, Tenn., in 2022. Courtesy of Aaron Miller

“A parent can try to explain away much of what a child might have seen on a television screen, but the imprint left behind by a book can be far more difficult to address,” Maikisch said.

Sexually Explicit Content

Starting in 2009, but escalating in 2015, a torrent of new books, teeming with graphic descriptions of child pornography, sex abuse, rape, masturbation, and other obscene topics swept into libraries, Maikisch said.

Today’s books are far more graphic than the controversial books of the past, she said.

“Books were challenged in the past for a plethora of reasons including controversial religious content, anti-American commentary, excessive profanity/racial slurs, communism propaganda, and explicit sexual activities,” Maikisch wrote. “The one standout issue here though is the explicit sexual content, which does not generally have educational value and has exponentially increased in severity in the books of today.”

She said she believes that books have gotten more obscene in order to groom children and normalize radical ideologies.

Another parent working to oppose obscene books, Summer Crow, has a different theory.

It starts with the schools’ focus on literacy, said Crow, who began opposing obscene books when a friendly teacher told her about explicit books in her district.

“In education, there’s been a big emphasis in the past five to 10 years that good readers are well-educated students,” she told The Epoch Times. “It’s all about getting kids to read, no matter the cost.”

If reading is the key to success in spelling, writing, and math, some educational experts conclude that no cost is too great in making books interesting to kids, she said. And kids love learning things they aren’t supposed to learn.

Summer Crow, a parent who opposes obscene books in school libraries. Photo courtesy of Summer Crow

“They’re intrigued by what they know they shouldn’t really have access to,” Crow said. “If we intrigue them with sexually explicit content, that’s something that a lot of kids are going to gravitate toward.”

She traces the trend to 2007 and the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, which she says had mediocre writing but was extremely popular.

“I question if it really makes them a better reader and speller, because it’s really bad literature. But they’re entertained by it,” Crow said.

Sex in School

BookLooks rates books on a scale of “zero” to “five,” Maikisch said. At “four,” the scale jumps from references to sexual activity to descriptions of sexual organs and obscene references to sexual activities. “Five” includes books with explicit references to sexual assault and sadomasochistic abuse.

Currently, on BookLooks, 81 books are rated “four” or “five.”

The ratings are assigned by a network of parents who volunteer to read the books.

BookLooks includes graphic passages from the books on its website so parents can make their own judgments, Maikisch said.

All the books on BookLooks, including the ones rated “four” and “five,” have been found in a school library somewhere, according to Maikisch, who sees grooming children as the aim.

“There is certainly an ideological inertia to try and normalize certain ideologies and world views with our children. Elements within our society have been open about doing this since the 1920s,” she wrote. “Specifically when it comes to sexual content, there is an element of grooming children by desensitizing them via exposure through books.”

Publishing Porn

The publishing industry bears a large amount of the blame for giving school libraries books containing child porn, according to Maikisch. But it’s not the only guilty party.

Of the books rated “four” or “five,” 26 come from the publisher Simon & Schuster, Maikisch said. Four come from Random House, and seven from HarperCollins.

Representatives for Simon & Schuster, Random House, and HarperCollins didn’t respond by press time to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.

Most publishers, including those three, don’t rate obscene books, said Brooke Stephens, a child protection activist.

“It’s so obvious that we need movie ratings,” she told The Epoch Times. “If they already accept ratings on movies, then it naturally follows that we should have ratings on books.”

But publishers don’t do so, Stephens said.

A schoolteacher sorts through library books collected from students at a New York City school on June 29, 2020. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

She added that taxpayer-funded libraries uncouple the book industry from normal market pressure.

When parents spend money on movies for their children, they ask for ratings so that they don’t buy a product their children can’t use, she said. But public libraries can buy any book.

“Parents wouldn’t take their kids to movies that haven’t been reviewed because of what might pop up,” Stephens said.

In the movie industry, companies adopted the rating system voluntarily to advise families which films were appropriate for children and which weren’t.

Often, libraries add books to their collections based on recommendations by Kirkus Review, School Library Journal, and the American Library Association, which Maikisch describes as “unreliable at best, and ideologically weaponized at worst.”

These groups also didn’t respond by press time to requests for comment.

Libraries usually have minimal vetting procedures for the books they offer to children, Maikisch said.

Still, these institutions have immense influence. America’s 120,000 libraries outnumber bookstores by more than 10 to 1, according to Standout Books. In 2017, each library added an average of 4,750 print books and 345 e-books to its collection, according to Inside Higher Ed.