Since July 2021, 22,810 instances of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts have been reported according to Pen America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression. In 1982, the American Library Association started Banned Books Week to spread awareness about book bans and keep track of bans and censorship across the country. 

Banned books are defined as books that have been restricted or removed from shelves because of objections to their content. 

Book bans in the United States were previously on the decline prior to 2021, said Alex Mosakowski, first year experience and student success librarian at William Allen White Library. Now, the U.S. appears to be going through a “book ban crisis” according to Pen America. On the heels of this “crisis” comes the beginning of 2025’s Banned Books Week, which began Monday and will run through Oct. 11. 

Book bans take several shapes. A book may be removed from school curriculum, which prevents teachers from using them in class or teaching about them, or may be removed from a school library. 

A more subtle form is moving banned books to low-traffic areas of a library or changing its shelving location, like moving a book written for young teens to the adult section. An age restriction may also be placed on a book, preventing certain ages from checking it out, or the book may only be available by asking a librarian. Book bans don’t always mean a book is wholly removed from a shelf; sometimes bans come in the form of restriction. 

“I think people are afraid,” Mosakowski said about the root of book bans. “There’s a lot of fear with the state of the country and polarization, economy, immigration and other social issues. I think people are not as informed, and others have exploited that fear to promote the idea that there are dangerous books that are corrupting children or students.”

Before the present-day surge in book bans, book bans typically arose by way of parent concern, said Mosakowski. Parents would read a book for their child and express concern that its content was inappropriate. Today, state legislation has been utilized to ban books by mandating that  books which meet certain criteria be removed from shelves in libraries and schools. States like Florida and Texas have implemented this type of legislative mandate.

Pen America writes that the majority of book bans occur due to pressure from outside sources and the fear of legislation being passed. Individuals may go into libraries with a list of hundreds of titles, demanding them to be removed even if they have never read them. Censorship from this type of pressure is widely considered to be dangerous to the American public, Mosakowski says. 

“First of all, democracy is dependent on the free market of ideas,’ he said. “So when you start censoring books, then you’re censoring ideas. And so you can’t have this free discourse to discuss ideas of different opinions and points of views if you start outlawing books.”

Book bans also tend to target stories and ideas featuring marginalized identities. Pen America emphasizes that if children are not able to find themselves represented in books or see their identities negatively portrayed, they start to believe that they are devalued. 

“A lot of these book bans are targeting books where the main characters are a minority, and so those identities are being erased… You know, (it is) being claimed that (a children’s book with) maybe a LGBT character in it is sexually explicit and therefore inappropriate just because of that character, (but) there’s no evidence of sexual explicitness. So they’re using that to ban certain types of representation in books,” said Mosakowski. 

Communities, parents, authors, educators and others have come together despite the large number of book bans to put local pressure on school districts to return banned books to shelves. Publicly showing support for reading is one way individuals can push back against large-scale book bans, Mosakowski says. It shows that libraries and bookstores should be able to have books with diverse viewpoints, even if not everybody agrees with the content. 

Bringing awareness to the type of books that have been banned is important too, he says. Popular titles like “Harry Potter” and “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom,” a children’s book, have been banned in certain areas. Pointing out these examples can help people better understand the importance of reading something before advocating for it to be banned. 

University Library & Archives is commemorating Banned Books Week with a pop-up on Memorial Union’s Main Street through Tuesday, Oct. 7 from noon to 1 p.m. Students can take a “mugshot” with a banned book and guess a banned book using clues from a guessing jar. 

The pop-up is a way for students to “show their support for intellectual freedom,” said Mosakowski.