Wait, you weren't allowed to read Harry Potter?

Most of you probably remember when Harry Potter was just starting as a phenomenon for our generation. People were lining up to buy the new book, the movies were still being made and Harry Potter was just absolutely everywhere. I was a part of the group of kids that loved all of it.

I inhaled the books and had to painfully wait for the last two, went to see all the films as soon as they came out and made myself a cape, riding around on the broom we used to clean leaves out of our yard. Me and my neighbors came up with a game called Voldemort-tag, but it wasn't a very lasting game as it was easy to just point to someone and say "Avada Kedavra". Anyway, all of this is just to show that I was really very into Harry Potter. 

As with my other books, I brought my Harry Potter books to school. I soon realised I might have just been the only child reading this series.

I went to a Christian school for 8 of my 9 years in basic education. This meant a lot of things, but specifically with Harry Potter it meant that most of my peers were not allowed to consume any media related to this franchise. No books, no movies, even saying "Harry Potter" was met with a glare or a "hmph", disapproving my involvement with such a series.

There were several members of faculty that voiced their opinion in class about this subject, so I've heard the "kids will think they want to be witches and they'll be involved with occultism and it's just a satanic series"-argument too many times, believe me. It confused me then and it confuses me today. My parents were and still are members of faculty at that school, but they took the rational approach with me and my siblings. They sat us down, explained to us that Harry Potter was fiction, that it was a fantasy story, and we understood. Our parents trusted us to understand that just because a boy in a movie used a wand to create magic didn't mean we could.

Years later the first Percy Jackson movie came out. It's a series based on Greek mythology, and I had several classmates who were also banned from reading or seeing things related to that franchise. This baffled me even more. Sure, with Harry Potter at least we know that occultism exists, but there is no way for Greek gods to suddenly become real again. It would take a very gullible child to believe in Greek gods after reading a book about it. Besides, mythology is historically significant and important. My sister read the same books and its helped her in her studies because she already has a base from those books. 

This all boils down to the effects approach to censorship of media. This approach, rooted in behavioral psychology, basically states that the consumption of media affects children and their behavior. These days this approach is mainly used in the argument against video game violence, where parents and scholars are saying that young men playing violent games leads to increased aggression in those individuals. For all the scholars saying video games lead to actual violence there are just as many saying they don't, and so this area of media effects is still highly debated. 

There was a study done in Italy about how reading Harry Potter helped children become more accepting of and empathetic towards stigmatized groups like immigrants and members of the LGBT community. This made me so happy to hear, because I think one of the most important things parents and society can teach children is to be accepting of other human beings no matter their race, age, gender or sexual orientation. Accepting individuals lead to an accepting society, which means a healthy society in which inequality won't rule.

I don't have children, so I don't know what it feels like to want to protect another human from anything harmful with such passion, but I still have common sense in the way that I wouldn't want to hinder the education of my children because of my own fears and prejudices. Obviously things like sex scenes and gore and violence are things we need to protect kids from, but fantasy worlds are the last thing we should be censoring from developing minds. This article on the Scientific American sums up why I also believe that censoring books like Harry Potter from your children is hindering their development in areas like empathy:

"A study published last year in Science found that reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction, results in keener social perception and increased empathy - empathy being defined more or less as the ability to alternate between different perspectives on a particular person or situation. Literature with complex, developed themes and characters appears to let readers occupy or adopt perspectives they might otherwise not consider; and it seems that Rowling might get at the beautiful, sobering mess of a life in a way that could have a meaningful impact on our children's collective character."

I don't know if you have had your parents ban anything from you before, but usually that just makes me want to find out more about that something. There's a seed of rebellion and curiosity in all our minds and when we're specifically told to stay away from something we might just want to go closer to it. If you honestly believe Harry Potter is bad for your kids, they're gonna find out about it somehow anyway so why not just face your concerns head on? That's why I really appreciate my parents just sitting us down and talking to us like normal human beings, without trying to overprotect us from things we're going to face in the world anyway. 

This post is my mind getting to the end of the tangent that my studying of film censorship lead me on. I have told so many of my friends that I had to hide or cover the front cover of my Harry Potter book in school because I could've been told off for it, and I guess their shock at this made me realise that not everyone went to school with people who had such worldwide phenomena forbidden. I admit, I will never understand the minds of these parents, and I know that religious views are most likely the entire reason why their kids weren't allowed to consume Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. My parents hold these same religious views but their approach just differed. I'd just hate to be a kid that was robbed of such a cultural experience.

I've talked to a few old friends from that school and I know that years later as they matured they went ahead and watched at least the movies, and that they didn't find them "occult" in any massive way. I don't know how they feel about their parents banning it from them as children, but I suppose you can't really miss something you never had.

Basically my point is that I don't understand unnecessarily censoring cultural products from your children, and though I understand parental fear and protection from a technical aspect, I can never really know what compels adults to do this. 

I'm back to studying now,

Becks