Sex and violence have been topics of YA books since the genre was invented. Realistically, they can't be avoided. They are, to a greater or lesser extent, part of teenage experience or their expectations of the adult world. But in YA publishing's early years, most of the action was offstage. When these topics first appeared onstage in single scenes, as in Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War (Pantheon, 1974) and Judy Blume's Forever… (Bradbury, 1975), they caused a furor. But now, 30 years later, we seem to be spared nothing. In particular, the amount of violence in books published for teens seems to be multiplying, and the descriptions include ever more disturbing detail. The same graphic explicitness that has been decried in films and games increasingly turns up in young adult fiction and is endemic in the fantasy that so many young adults prefer. In my work with middle schoolers and as a longtime reviewer, I can't help but notice this troubling trend even in the best of the literature. In fact, reading hundreds of recommended titles for an American Library Association booklist called Best Books for Young Adults over the past two years has made me wonder where this violence, especially sexual violence, is coming from and what effect it might have on teen readers. Here are some examples from recent well-regarded books. In a scene in Kevin Brooks's Lucas (Scholastic, 2003), the protagonist is nearly raped by her brother's friends and the title character seems ready to cut the rapist's private parts with his knife. In the privileged world of Nick McDonell's Twelve: A Novel (Grove, 2002), the brother of a party-giver demonstrates his love of weaponry with a grotesque shoot-out. Even the cover appears as if it's spattered with blood. Is this casual violence a part of teens' lives that we don't see and doesn't get reported to authorities? In Dennis Foon's Skud (Groundwood, 2003), readers are shown four different ways of managing anger and violent impulses through the narratives of a brutal hockey player, a seemingly perfect air force cadet, a hardened criminal, and a boy who wants to play the role of punk. Is this how young men's lives are defined? Do we need to know all the gory details? Child abuse, once carefully alluded to in stories of hostile, angry teenagers, is now exhaustively described. In E. R. Frank's America (Atheneum, 2002), Teresa Toten's The Game (Red Deer, 2001), and Jeanne Willis's The Truth or Something: A Novel (Holt, 2002), carefully sealed memories of sexual abuse leak out and overwhelm readers with vivid word pictures. In Adam Rapp's 33 Snowfish (Candlewick, 2003) and Paul Fleischman's Breakout (Cricket/Marcato, 2003), the abuse is part of daily living. The brutalities of detention centers are exposed in books like Jack Gantos's Hole in My Life (Farrar, 2002) and Rebecca Fjelland Davis's Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged (HarperTempest, 2003). But do we need to see Jake abusing the calves? What is a reader to make of stories about the creation of a killer as in John Halliday's Shooting Monarchs (McElderry, 2003)? Do we need to know what it was like for three-year-old Macy to be tied to a swing in the rain? A graphic novel like Steve Niles's Thirty Days of Night (IDW, 2003), which, in the text, is a rather ordinary vampire story, is liberally illustrated in page after page of blood spots. In a fantasy based on Icelandic mythology even more brutal than that of the Greeks, Melvin Burgess's Bloodtide (Tor, 2001) places readers right there as a character's legs are amputated. The middle school students I work with take sexual content in stride. They have been hearing about sex for years; they are familiar with the words even if they have not yet experienced the passions that lie behind them. Furthermore, this is information they want. They look forward to growing up to be sexual beings themselves. They can hardly wait. Their reactions to explicit violence are quite different. While some are enthralled, many prefer not to read these books. Violence is pretty much absent in their own lives. Like the majority of young people today, the students I see do not live in a world where street violence is a regular occurrence, although they are quite aware that some of their age-mates do. They have never experienced corporal punishment in schools and many have parents who do not believe in spanking. They are surprised and concerned when a parent or teacher slaps, spanks, or beats a child in books we read together in class; such scenes inevitably provoke spirited classroom discussion. Actual physical fighting is a rare occurrence in their sheltered, supervised lives. During their primary-school years, they did not walk to school on their own and many have had relatively little unstructured play experience. They were not free to roam the neighborhood, whether their neighborhoods were city streets or suburban backyards and woods. Their understanding of violence comes from the screen and the printed page. They are both more familiar with the possibilities and less knowledgeable about actual pain and suffering. The comfortable cartoon world of characters that rebound from appalling disasters is certainly easier to take than a book that dwells on the feelings of a character suffering physical and emotional abuse. They don't much care for reading or hearing this. Reading the details in a realistic novel is a very different experience from adding them from your own imagination. All readers re-create the text according to their own experience and understanding. In journals, a number of my students have noted that they prefer books that leave holes for them to fill with their own imagination. What are we doing to readers when we fill in the gaps, and particularly when we fill them with details of aggression and cruelty beyond the reach of their imaginations and experiences? Many readers are able to protect themselves (as, years ago, my fifth graders universally protected themselves by completely missing the rape in Jean Craighead George's Julie of the Wolves (HarperCollins, 1972)). Could it be that we believe these young people, raised on pictures as well as words, are less able to make pictures in their heads? And are these the pictures they need? I do not believe that these gritty and raw books represent reality. I'm afraid that authors, editors, and book buyers in stores and libraries believe much of the hype they see in the media. In truth, serious violent crime rates in the United States have declined steadily since 1993, and are now about half the level they averaged between 1973 and 1993, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Homicide, rape, and robbery rates are way down. Across the United States, the proportion of serious violent crimes committed by juveniles has generally declined since 1993, as well. In Washington, DC, where I teach, the total number of juvenile arrests fell from 5151 in 1988 to 2102 in 2002. Two-thirds of those arrests are for what are called acts against property or acts against public order, rather than acts against people. While teens are most often the victims of violent crimes, that rate, too, has declined since 1993, from roughly 115 per 1000 to 55 per 1000. According to the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect, reports of child abuse have dropped over the past five years. In 28 U.S. states, corporal punishment is banned in schools, and there have been proposals for banning it in homes. School shootings declined throughout the 1990s but stories of the conditions that might lead to such events like Ron Koertge's The Brimstone Journals (Candlewick, 2001), David Klass's Home of the Braves (Farrar, 2002), and Alex Flinn's Breaking Point (HarperCollins, 2002) continue to appear. These well-written and thoughtful titles may be useful for discussing some of the underlying problems, but they do not represent the norm. How many of our schools are rife with seriously troubled, armed and dangerous youths? In 2000, 12- to 18-year-olds were twice as likely to be victims of serious violent crime away from school than when they were in school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The overwhelming majority of them were never victims of any sort. Between 1995 and 2001 the percentage of students who reported being victims of crime at school (mostly thefts) was down from 10 percent to 6 percent. But Americans seem to believe that these indexes are rising. In a 1999 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 71 percent of respondents thought a school shooting was likely in their community. This belief has to arise from the extensive media coverage of juvenile crime. According to a study published by the Berkeley Media Studies Group and the Justice Policy Institute, "Although violent crime by youth in 1998 was at its lowest point in the 25-year history of the National Crime Victimization Survey, 62% of poll respondents felt that juvenile crime was on the increase." The authors of this study reminded readers that we all construct our visions of reality from what we have seen, heard, or read even more than from personal experience. If our news media plays up juvenile violence, as the 2001 study showed, we can't help but believe that this is what is going on in the world. Neil Howe and William Strauss surveyed a large number of high school students recently and reported their findings in Millennials Rising (Vintage, 2000). They offer a much more hopeful vision of the newest generation of young adults. They described them as many things: optimists, rule followers, team oriented, sheltered, pressured, and achieving, but, in their words, "less violent, vulgar, and sexually charged than the pop culture being produced for them." This is certainly my own experience. This is not to deny that there are young people for whom such violence is a fact of life. They deserve the opportunity to see themselves in literature. Do they need the graphic detail? Will the rest of us be desensitized by our overexposure? Those of us who write for or select among and share books with young adults seem to be part of the problem when we emphasize violence. Can we be part of the solution?

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Author Information

Kathleen T. Isaacs is on the faculty at the Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC