"Strange" extracurricular reading materials for children are worrying, containing violent and pornographic plot books | Children | Plot
At a party, a boy fell in love with a girl at first sight. After repeatedly expressing his love but being rejected, he began to track her and harass people around her, even engaging in violent behavior... The girl couldn't bear the disturbance and sued her, and the boy was sentenced to probation. The boy shouted in court, "What I lost is freedom, but what I won't lose is love for you!" Hearing this, the girl's heart was touched and finally willing to accept the boy's love. The two embraced deeply in court and lived happily ever after.
The above story comes from a collection of recommended stories for children under 12 years old to read. At the end of the story, there is a reflection question "What does this story teach us?" The answer given in the book is - as long as we persist, we will achieve the desired results.
Mr. Zou, a resident of Chaoyang District, Beijing, stumbled upon his child's extracurricular book while flipping through it. Upon reading this story, his first reaction was "strange": "Packaging harassment behavior as persistent pursuit of love, what kind of impact will it have on children under the age of 12?"
A recent investigation by a reporter from the Legal Daily found that this kind of children's book, which makes parents and children feel "strange", is constantly appearing in the market. Some books contain descriptions of violence, horror, and pornography, while some children's picture books have exposed illustrations and strange character proportions. Even worse, there is content that distorts history and leads to negative values.
Experts interviewed by reporters believe that children's extracurricular reading materials are the foundation for their enlightenment reading, and high-quality books will make children fall in love with reading. However, there are many mixed quality books in the current market, and some children's extracurricular reading materials may even seriously harm their physical and mental health. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to and rectify them.
Contains violent and pornographic scenes
Infringement of children's physical and mental health
Recently, Ms. Lai, a resident of Tianjin, purchased a children's picture book called "Don't Be Careless XX" for her 4-year-old daughter online. However, after receiving the book, Ms. Lai casually flipped through a few pages and found that the entire book was filled with unpleasant conversations.
Not only that, the illustrations in the book also left Ms. Lai stunned: there was a picture of a man holding a little girl, the little girl revealing her underwear, and the man's hand was placed on the girl's private area.
Ms. Lai told reporters that this picture book has a considerable online sales volume, and the promotional page reads - a sex education book dedicated to children, and even recommended books for many stores. "Under the guise of sex education, but in reality only talking about 'sex' has no positive educational significance. It is difficult to imagine how a child's values will be affected after reading it."
This is not the first time Ms. Lai has stepped on a trap in children's extracurricular reading materials. She had previously bought a children's book called "XXX Celebrates Birthday", with the background story of a little bear celebrating its birthday and inviting animal friends such as chickens, rabbits, and tigers. At first glance, the story seems normal, but later on, while everyone was eating cake, the book suggested "one less child", and there was an extra plate of roasted chicken on the table. The chicken that had appeared before disappeared from sight.
Ms. Lai recalled that she was reading this book with her daughter at the time. When she turned to this page, her daughter had not yet reacted and kept asking her "which child was missing", but Ms. Lai didn't know how to answer. "The author treats vulgarity as fun and shows no respect for children's innocence and kindness."
During a recent investigation and interview, reporters also found that some children's extracurricular reading materials contain harmful content.
The "Jiangxi Province Children's Extracurricular Reading Consumption Survey Report" released by the Jiangxi Provincial Consumer Rights Protection Committee in May 2022 shows that some children's extracurricular reading materials have problems such as inducing bad behavior, using vulgar language, violence, and tampering with classics. For example, in the book "Brainstorming - Intelligence Competition", it presents the content that "the reason why no one is injured when a plane falls from the sky is because they all die", which is not conducive to children's psychological growth.
Moreover, some children's extracurricular reading materials have serious errors in historical knowledge. In May of this year, a series of historical books titled "Chinese History for Children" were exposed to have factual errors: when telling the story of the Sino Japanese naval battle during the First Sino Japanese War, the book used a "surrender map of Ding Ruchang". The actual situation is that Ding Ruchang, as the commander of the Beiyang Navy, led his troops to resist the Japanese army tenaciously and refused to surrender before making heroic sacrifices. After the incident was exposed, the publisher of the book reported that there were indeed inappropriate illustrations in the book. We have immediately contacted relevant units to stop sales and have fully recovered and destroyed them.
Xi Peizhi, Deputy Secretary General of the Juvenile Law Research Association of the Shanghai Law Society, believes that the market for extracurricular reading materials for children is huge and diverse, with uneven quality. These issues may involve shallow content, incomplete storylines, inappropriate language expression, distorted values, and other aspects. The phenomenon of uneven quality of reading materials needs attention. These issues will have a significant negative impact on children's reading experience, learning ability, and moral development.
Sun Hongyan, a researcher at the China Youth Research Center, told reporters that negative content may convey incorrect values, such as encouraging violence, discrimination, and comparison, leading to children forming incorrect moral concepts and values. At the same time, there may be inappropriate behaviors in some negative content, such as violence, bullying, etc. Children are prone to imitating these behaviors, leading to their tendency to engage in negative behavior. After children are exposed to such extracurricular reading materials, they may become accustomed to this kind of spiritual nourishment and unwilling to appreciate some elegant literature, which is very detrimental to their personality development.
"Inaccurate or incorrect information may have a negative impact on children's cognition and knowledge development, misleading their understanding and judgment of things. Negative content may cause children's fear, anxiety, and emotional instability, which can have a negative impact on their mental health. Poor quality extracurricular reading materials for children may cause them to lose interest in reading, affecting their reading habits and the cultivation of reading abilities." Xi Peizhi said.
Poor quality pirated books rampant
Affects normal publishing order
It is worth noting that a children's book that can be published from a legitimate publishing house often undergoes strict censorship.
Xin Xin, a senior children's book editor at a certain publishing house, told reporters that his publishing house has both domestic original and foreign imported copyrights. After a children's book is confirmed for publication, as editors, they will first review the text, provide relevant images, and then submit them for review and final review. Based on the review and final review comments, they will modify the application number, design the cover, calculate costs, negotiate channels... Finally, the final draft will be sent to the printing factory for printing and brushing, and the printing quality will be supervised by the printing factory.
Xin Xin said that under strict inspection and review procedures, any problematic content will be immediately dealt with. She gave an example, saying, "There is a set of sex education picture books imported from Japan for children around 13 years old. After various considerations, we have decided to delete one of the illustrations of a fully naked adult woman. Firstly, this illustration is more realistic; secondly, considering that girls at this age may not have fully developed, which may cause them 'body anxiety' and other problems."
So, under strict editing procedures, why are there still many children's extracurricular reading materials criticized?
"Some children's book authors and publishers do not start from the concept of serving and protecting minors when creating content, resulting in some negative, vulgar, and violent content in children's books. At the same time, economic interests are also an important driving factor. In order to make the book sell better, they use some self perceived 'fashionable' content to attract young readers," said Sun Hongyan.
Renowned writer and publisher San Shi told reporters that children's extracurricular books are an important sector of the publishing market, which is prone to quick success and instant benefits, especially for non original works. There are phenomena of piecing together and copying, and some are heavy on text and light on images, with low quality illustrations. These are all prone to content quality problems and even the generation of bad content.
"What urgently needs to be strictly controlled now are large online sales platforms and small private sales channels. The former is more serious, which is the most troublesome problem for our publishing house. Piracy and low-quality children's extracurricular books seriously affect the normal publishing order," said Sanshi.
In Xi Peizhi's view, in some cases, there may be omissions or imperfections in the review and supervision of children's extracurricular books by relevant regulatory agencies. This may allow content that is not suitable for children to escape scrutiny and regulation and enter the market. At the same time, cultural differences may also have an impact. In a cross-cultural context, the negative content of some books may be caused by cultural differences, misunderstandings, or inaccurate understanding of children's literature by creators. Some content may be considered appropriate in one culture, but may be considered unsuitable for children in another culture.
"These issues indicate the need to regulate and guide the market and creative environment for children's extracurricular books. In order to ensure that children can access suitable and beneficial book content, it is necessary to strengthen the review mechanism, industry self-discipline, and educational guidance for children's extracurricular books. At the same time, parents and educators should actively participate, cultivate children's reading awareness and selection ability, and help them screen and understand books that are suitable for their age and development stage." Xi Peizhi said.
Promote graded reading standards
Improving the quality of extracurricular reading materials
During the investigation and interview, the reporter found that there is still controversy over the determination of whether some children's extracurricular reading materials are "bad". Some people believe it is "bad content", but others believe it is "normal literary creation".
For example, in a comic series of Chinese history books that claim to be "recommended by multiple schools and knowledge skyrocketing", there are descriptions of the founding emperor of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, Zhu Wen, who "scraped the ashes". Some parents are angry and post a rebuke, saying, "Are children's extracurricular reading materials not being reviewed now? Surprisingly, they are still recommended by online websites." However, in the comment section of the post, some parents believe that "nothing" and "it is good to make children interested in history and willing to read books related to history".
Sun Hongyan believes that the reason for the controversy over whether there is harmful content is precisely because there is currently a lack of content standards for children's extracurricular reading materials. "To determine whether children's extracurricular reading materials are inappropriate, the most important thing is to conform to the physical and mental development and cognitive characteristics of minors in different age groups. There are significant differences in the acceptance ability of words and pictures among different age groups, and age restrictions can also affect the judgment of whether children's book content is appropriate. However, currently we lack classification standards for children's books based on different age groups."
Professor Zhang Dandan from the School of Journalism and Communication at Hunan Normal University is currently leading a team to delve into the field of children's picture books. In her opinion, the uneven quality of children's extracurricular reading materials is due to a lack of standards.
Previously, China mentioned in the 2011 China Children's Development Outline the promotion of a grading system for children's books, but the outline did not specify the specific time and plan for implementation. In February 2023, the group standard for graded reading guidance for children aged 3-8 was released. This is the first children's graded reading standard officially released by an industry association in China, aiming to standardize the grading characteristics of children's extracurricular reading materials, clarify reading ability guidance goals, and fill the gap in graded reading guidance standards.
In Xi Peizhi's view, although there are some relevant regulations and guidance documents, there is still a lack of unified and authoritative standards for the publication, distribution, and sales of children's literature for the entire industry.
For this reason, he suggests establishing authoritative and scientific standards and guidance for children's literature, clarifying the requirements for the content, quality, and suitability of children's extracurricular reading materials. This can provide publishers, editors, writers, and other relevant practitioners with clear references and norms to ensure the quality and educational value of children's extracurricular books published.
What is truly a high-quality reading material suitable for children?
Zhang Dandan believes that comprehensive consideration is needed to find a good picture book suitable for children's age, and high-quality children's extracurricular reading materials need to meet four requirements: the content should be interesting enough, the picture content should be beautiful enough, the proportion of pictures and text should be appropriate, and the content should be close to life.
Xi Peizhi suggests that relevant departments and publishing units should strictly review children's extracurricular reading materials, exclude content that is not suitable for children to read, and ensure that the content is healthy, positive, and educational; Promote a grading and labeling system for children's extracurricular books, helping parents, educators, and children choose books that are suitable for their age and reading ability; Promote industry self-discipline, encourage industry organizations and associations to develop self-discipline norms, and strengthen self-discipline supervision of the children's literature market.
In Sun Hongyan's view, whether it is authors, publishers, schools, or parents, they must prioritize serving minors and strengthen training for authors and editors. At the same time, strengthen reading guidance at home and school, recommend good books, and make children truly fall in love with reading.
As a practitioner in the children's book publishing industry, Xin Xin calls on parents to try to purchase genuine books from official channels, so as to reduce the probability of purchasing children's extracurricular reading materials with inappropriate content. If you feel that there are any inappropriate aspects in the content, you can contact after-sales customer service. Generally, as a children's book editor, after receiving a question, you will provide a more professional response.
"If you see children's books that you really like but are not selling well, please take the lead in purchasing genuine support publishers. Otherwise, there may be fewer and fewer excellent children's extracurricular books on the market, and they will be replaced by cheap, pieced together, and short production cycle children's extracurricular books." Xin Xin said.
