During the 2023-2024 academic year, nearly 10,000 books were banned in US public schools-a threefold increase from the previous year, according to a recent report by PEN America, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to protecting free expression.
As new censorship laws are passed by Republican-led states, this study shows a sharp increase over the previous year. According to PEN America’s survey, the number of book bans has almost tripled countrywide from 3,362 the year before.
The authors of the survey revealed that about 8,000 book bans were recorded in Florida and Iowa, largely because of state laws. Several school districts outside of Florida and Iowa also banned heightened numbers of books this school year, such as the Elkhorn Area School District in Wisconsin, which banned more than 300 titles for several months.
In part due to the targeting of sexual content, the stark increase includes books featuring romance, books about women’s sexual experiences, and books about rape or sexual abuse, as well as continued attacks on books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, or books about race or racism and featuring characters of colour, as per the report.
Hinting that the number of banned books could be much higher than expected, the organisation mentioned in its report that “our numbers are certainly an undercount, as stories of book bans often go unreported. These numbers also do not account for the many reports of soft censorship, including increased hesitancy in book selection, ideologically-driven restrictions of school book purchases, the removal of classroom collections, and the cancellations of author visits and book fairs.”