Censorship in Children's Writing - A Matter of Debate
What follows is a recent post of mine some of you may have read in last week's Pass It On e-zine by Jackie Hosking . It attempted to lift the lid on the curly question of 'Do books need a rating? ' As predicted this is an absorbing topic for debate, one that I'm probably not fully qualified to adjudicate but am fascinated by. Ben Marshall raised some interesting and salient points in his response (thanks Ben) in this week's PIO issue 415 . He argued 'that censoring books is a form of lying'; that young people can in fact enact their own form of censorship merely by closing the book; and that exposure to the warts and all darker bits of life through the written word is a good way to prepare them for if. I tend to agree with him. From an author's point of view, rigorous and formal censorship would only create another loop through which writers, publishers and agents alike would all have to jump, further frustrating the actual production of a book f...
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