Do Not Ban Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Content warning: This post addresses themes of sexual abuse. 

Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak has been faced with extensive censorship since it was published in 1999, and has been consistently challenged for more than 20 years. It has been securely in the top 100 most banned books since 2000, setting its record at the #4 spot in 2020. People challenging the novel deem it “soft-pornography,” saying it’s a “glorification of drinking, cursing, and premarital sex,” claiming it “was thought to contain a political viewpoint,” and dubbing it “biased against male students.”

With a description like that, you’d picture a hyper-misandrist book chock full of constant partying, drinking, insane amounts of teenage sex and profanity that would kill your grandma. In reality, it’s a book about a girl dealing with the traumatic repercussions of being raped. She actively avoids parties and drinking. She can’t bring herself to go to a party because she got raped at one. The “pornographic”, “glorification of drinking and premarital sex” is her reliving her trauma of being raped while drunk at a party.

Speak was difficult for me at times–it’s a book that resonates with me to an unfortunate degree and reading rape scenes is always something that is really hard for me. It always will be. But I think the book is wonderfully written, and very accurately represents the toll sexual abuse can take on someone. I think it’s a very important resource to have, because this does happen to people. Some people get raped and can’t talk about it, and having a novel that tackles that so effectively is valuable. Talking about rape is scary. Sexual assault is something that comes with very heavy shame–it’s not something you hear talked about, it’s not something anyone likes to talk about, but those discussions are important. Books like Speak are important, realistic portrayals of victims’ experiences are crucial to breaking the overwhelming guilt that comes with talking about assault. I think this shame is something the book tackles well–the fact that Melinda was raped isn’t mentioned to almost the end of the book, like she didn’t want to mention it. You gradually piece together the story before she says anything directly. She talks about being unsure if it counts as rape, blaming herself, and depictions of this shame are really important to dismantling it in real victims.

Given how well, how realistically Speak portrays rape and the trauma that comes with, the response to the book says a lot about how we as a society think about rape. If Speak, a non-political, realistic depiction of dealing with that kind of trauma, is “pushing a political agenda” or “biased against male students,” we need to reevaluate how we think about rape. The idea that portraying a rapist is a demonization of boys is a clear indicator of how accepted, how normalized it is for teenage boys to get away with sexual abuse; the whole ‘boys will be boys’ idea, concepts of female modesty and ‘asking for it.’ If portraying rape as negative is pushing a political agenda, we definitely have to dive into why one side would take offense to depictions of rape and rapists as a bad thing. The interpretation of Speak as “glorifying underage drinking and premarital sex” disgusts me. “Glorification” implies “inaccurately positive portrayal”, and if you read a traumatic scene of an intoxicated teenager getting raped as a positive portrayal of premarital sex and underage drinking, there is genuinely something wrong with you. If you deem portraying her rapist as a bad person to be biased against male students, there is genuinely something wrong with you. Speak is not a political book. It’s a novel about dealing with the trauma of sex abuse, and if you view rape as a political issue, there is genuinely something wrong with you.