Wednesday, November 2, 2011

intellectual freedom, minors, and the ALA



Intellectual Freedom: At Every Age
(essay for LIS 651-02)

Parents and teachers have a responsibility to prepare the young to meet the diversity of experiences in life to which they will be exposed, as they have a responsibility to help them learn to think critically for themselves. These are affirmative responsibilities, not to be discharged simply by preventing them from reading works for which they are not yet prepared.
                                    Proposition 4, Freedom to Read Statement

A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.
                                                Article V, Library Bill of Rights


            Although I was generally familiar with the idea that librarians take a liberal view on intellectual freedom and the right to information, I hadn’t thought much about what that meant until I attended the American Library Association’s Annual Conference & Exhibition this year.  I was lucky to have my travel to New Orleans, conference registration, and lodging paid for with a scholarship.  As a student, I had no particular agenda to accomplish, and the only session I knew I wanted to attend was the opening ceremony.  The keynote speaker for ALA 2011 was Dan Savage, an author most well-known for his outspoken political opinions, gay rights advocacy, and his long-running syndicated sex advice column, Savage Love.  His writing style is humorous, witty, sharply critical, and astonishingly frank.  Although he’s a best-selling author and editor, his iconoclastic streak and controversial views wouldn’t seem to make him the most obvious choice to represent the ALA at its largest professional gathering.  Beginning in the fall of 2010, however, Savage had taken on a new venture, one that perhaps endeared him to the library community more.  The It Gets Better Project, as it’s called, is a web-based outreach effort intended for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) youth.  It may in fact be more radical than anything else Savage has done, but combining an innovative use of technology and social media with a commitment to the free dissemination of information is like a librarian dream come true.  The project had come up in a number of my courses, related to discussions of digital archiving, community archives and cultural heritage collections, and born-digital media preservation. 
            I had always liked Savage’s work and was looking forward to hearing him speak, but I knew he wasn’t likely to address the topics I was particularly interested in--technical details like metadata and the intellectual organization of such a collection.  I recognized the social significance of It Gets Better, but until I heard Savage speak about the project I hadn’t considered that information policy has special ramifications for minors. 
            A series of highly publicized suicides by gay teens was Savage’s call to action.  He saw a simple lack of information at the root of the crisis.  Maybe these teenagers were bullied and harassed by their peers or condemned by their families, but if they could just be armed with the knowledge that life does get better (eventually), maybe they could find the will to survive.  The question was how to reach them, and YouTube provided an easy answer.  The technology was easy to access and already familiar to kids growing up in an era of ubiquitous personal computing and instant Internet access.  Savage and his partner recorded a very personal video describing the difficulties they had faced as gay teenagers and the rewarding lives they had gone on to make for themselves, ending with a heartfelt plea to kids in similar situations to just stay alive long enough to make it to that better life.  They uploaded it to the Web and asked a few friends to contribute their own stories.  Within two weeks they hit the maximum number of videos allowed by YouTube and had to migrate the content to their own website.  There are now tens of thousands of videos representing celebrities, politicians, professional athletes, business leaders, and average adults from all walks of life.  The message of the project has grown to encompass any adolescent suffering from bullying or harassment at school, regardless of sexual orientation.  But the situation for LGBT youth remains most serious:  they are four times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual teenagers, and eight times more likely if their families are “highly rejecting.”[1]  Some estimate that 40% of homeless teenagers are LGBT youth kicked out after coming out to their own families.[2]  For kids who are living in hostile environments 24-hours-a-day, there may be no safe haven between home and school, no one they can talk to.  Savage described the important role the Chicago Public Library played in his own adolescent life, when was too afraid to be seen with “gay books,” so he would quietly take them from one section of the library, read them, and surreptitiously leave them elsewhere in the stacks.  The It Gets Better Project is entirely about bypassing hostile, adult gatekeepers and guaranteeing minors their own rights to vital information.  Savage pointed out in his speech that this is the same subversive and essential task that librarians are charged with carrying out every day in a number of ways.
            His narrative provides a powerful argument for the importance of defending the right of minors to freely access information.  Many people who are comfortable with the idea that freedom of speech (as established by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) means some offensive forms of expression must be tolerated are less comfortable when the rights of children are involved in the conversation.  Censorship is generally understood to be un-American, but we also accept parental advisory labels and the movie rating system, legislate education requirements for children, and deny minors the right to vote.  Pretty much everyone agrees that there is a lot of stuff on the Internet that would be terribly inappropriate for children to stumble across, but we are also likely to condemn China’s practice of blocking access to websites that might disagree with government policy.  When we start talking about children there is a tendency to get alarmed more easily, and the fact that minors are not equal to adults in the eyes of the law appears to set a precedent for the idea that they might not receive the full protection of the U.S. Constitution.  The fact is that judicial interpretations of constitutional law are not entirely clear on this matter and have continued to evolve.  (For one example, we now consider women and people of color to possess the full rights of U.S. citizens.)
            The Library Bill of Rights (first adopted by the ALA Council in 1939, amended and reaffirmed continuously thereafter) takes a more unequivocal stance.  All information is valuable, no opinions or points of view should be censored, and no one should be denied access, regardless of age.  The ALA expands upon these basic ideas in a series of “interpretations” including one addressing “Free Access to Libraries for Minors” (adopted 1972, amended 1981, 1991, 2004). This states that minors’ rights are “unquestionably” protected by the First Amendment.  Additionally, parents are the only ones who should be responsible for advising, guiding, and restricting their children’s access to inappropriate materials--this is not the librarian’s role. 
            The “Free Access to Libraries for Minors” statement emphasizes that lack of information can be more harmful than accessing ‘wrong’ information.  The It Gets Better Project illustrates this as well.  In practice, of course, nothing is ever so black and white. There are ongoing challenges and revisions to the scope and intent of the U.S. Constitution, and librarians everywhere must balance their professional ideals with the needs and desires of their user communities.  Collection Development means excluding some materials and choosing others.  Readers’ Advisory is supposed to be a neutral sort of recommendation service, but it necessitates some subjective interpretation of the material in question.  Is it ok to assign “reading levels” (Kindergarten, Grades 3-4, etc.) to children’s books?  Probably.  Is it censorship to not include The Story of O in a middle school library?  Probably not.  This balancing act is an essential part of life in a democratic society.  Re-evaluating, re-establishing, and expanding the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens is another hallmark of democratic life.  Children are people, too, and if they are mature and capable enough to  deliberately seek out specific information, it should not be denied to them. 
            The ALA’s Freedom to Read statement (adopted 1953, amended 1972, 1991, 2000, 2004) is somewhat grandiose, but I think it is appropriately so.  It ends on the following note:  “We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”