When do we decide its time to ban a book?

And what basis do we use to figure out what our children need?

Trigger Warning: contains themes of Child/Physical abuse

When I was a member of University teaching staff, I used to teach a final-year course called ‘The Epistemology of Developmental Theories’. I loved teaching it because the students began the course having no idea what the word really meant.

Epistemology is essentially intellectual navel-gazing. It is the study of knowledge itself. How do we know what we know? What counts as truth and not-truth? How do we decide that? On what basis can we ever decide to believe in anything? How do we choose between different possible courses of action? The students either loved or hated the course. Ultimately, their response depended on how able they were to sit with uncertainty.

I found myself thinking about those students last week, when I was sent a link to a petition  that is drawing growing attention through social media. It asks Amazon to ban several parenting books from their catalogue. The petition was introduced in August 2011, with 200,000 people having now signed it (or one of five related petitions). It has been discussed in the UK Parliament, on MumsNet, in the Huffington Post and on Fox TV News, and Facebook traffic is rapidly increasing as other organisations and individuals yield their support to the campaign.