The walled-off library

[owlectomy]

Some time ago on Facebook there was a discussion about whether teen nonfiction materials should be put into their own section to protect teens from potential predators. And I'm like - lots of these kids are going to be in COLLEGE in a couple of years. Reading adult-level nonfiction (if not Baudrillard and Foucault-level nonfiction!) is part of the skill set they're going to need. Interacting with adults is part of the skillset they're going to need. There isn't enough teen nonfiction to provide a decent-sized collection for browsing and research at most public libraries, anyway, unless you have millions of dollars to just duplicate the adult collection.

And then another discussion came up about teen-only areas in libraries. And, you know, I think it's a nice idea to have a place for teens to hang out with comfortable chairs, that doesn't immediately get taken over by 10-year-olds, or by adults running small businesses out of the library. (But let adults BROWSE THE COLLECTION, please, even if they're not allowed to sit down!) However - it does bother me when this is positioned as a measure to protect teens from sexual predators. Safety is something you achieve through good sight lines and adequate staffing, not by imagining that everyone 17 and under is a potential victim and everyone 18 and over is a potential criminal.

I think that when we talk about 'helicopter parenting,' one of the things we're really talking about is the kind of suburbanization that makes it impossible for a child to go to a friend's house or the movies or the convenience store without begging an adult for a ride; it makes independence harder. I think that as a librarian, it's really important to protect teens, but it's also important to foster their independence, their curiosity -- their young adulthood, really.

Comments

[the_rck]

We live in town, but my daughter's school friends all live in places she can't get to without transportation of some sort. There are buses, but she's not willing to ride alone. She's thirteen today. I'd have let her ride the buses on her own any time the last two years. I even offered to teach her the routes she was most likely to want. I thought she might enjoy going downtown to the library on her own or maybe walking around there a bit.

She has talked about walking to downtown, but there are bits with no sidewalk between here and there and some streets to cross that need lights but don't have them. I let her walk to a smaller, branch library that's about the same distance away but much safer to get to, but there's nothing interesting around it. Also, I think she failed to realize what walking forty minutes in July while wearing a backpack would feel like. She hasn't wanted to do that again.

She has two friends relatively near (about two miles), but the road to get there isn't safe for biking and doesn't have sidewalks. She has another friend who lives about twice that far away. There simply aren't any kids in the neighborhood her age. I'm surprised because we're about a block from her school which is a magnet school but automatically admits kids who live within a certain area. Everyone else has to go through a lottery.

Even though we're in town, the nearest movie theater is about a fifteen minute drive (about an hour and a half by bus, and the buses don't run at night). We're not in a small town, either. Mainly the problem is that downtown doesn't have anything but upscale restaurants and art galleries.

[pinesandmaples]

Safety is something you achieve through good sight lines and adequate staffing, not by imagining that everyone 17 and under is a potential victim and everyone 18 and over is a potential criminal.

To pull a Tumblrism, let's say it again for the people in the back.

[rachelmanija]

Everything about this is stupid.

[writerjenn.livejournal.com]

The Philadelphia central lending library had a policy--I'm not sure if they still do, but it wouldn't surprise me--of not letting any adult into the children's section without a child. Aside from that thwarting my own ability to do research on children's books as a writer, it also made me wonder: don't parents ever need to check out books for their kids at times when their kids aren't available? It just seemed to me a very sledgehammer type of approach.