The Psychology of Censorship
Censorship: it’s a dreaded word in every librarian’s ear. The sound of it makes men and women alike cringe and stirs in the very depths of their being a sort of innate and vitriolic response. There’s a sense that anyone who challenges a book is small-minded, dim, petty, fanatical, and altogether not worth dealing with. There’s a desire to bite into them, to attack and cleave them to pieces, to whisper belittlingly behind their backs or mock them openly. But the question is: what does this really achieve? It may make the librarian feel good and noble for putting down the fell savages, but in truth all this does is divide and inflame and further the library from its true purpose: serving the community[1].
So, should we just give in to every challenge and be at the whim of the community? No; rather, the ideal is one of balance and communication. The people on the other side of the issue—of any issue really—are, in fact, people with lives and reasons behind what they do. It’s easy, as is all-too-often seen in the realm of politics, to simply dismiss or demean the other side, to see them as people trying to “destroy America,” or otherwise ruin the state of things like some strangely selfish and self-destructive creatures. Indeed this is the creed of conflict, to dehumanize one’s opponents to make it easier to fight them, and as politics has shown this doesn’t lead to a particularly happy or harmonious society, but rather one that acts as though it’s in constant conflict.
The goal then is to understand and communicate, learning when to fight a battle, when to compromise, and when the other side may actually be right. Let’s take a theoretical example: You’re a single parent working hard to raise and take care of your child while making enough to support the both of you. You’d like to spend more time with your child but work really doesn’t allow that, and much as you’d like to work less you’re barely surviving as it is. You want to have more of a role in your child’s life and want to be able to guide and teach them, but as it is you feel as though you have to turn them over to school, their peers, television, and society at large and hope for the best. You want them to be safe, to grow up well, to avoid drugs and have a life better than your own, to have more of a chance, more of an opportunity.
You arrive home late one night—let’s be honest, you get home late every night—and find your child already asleep. Their books are splayed across the table in that most haphazard of fashions and, on a whim, you pick one up. Flipping through the pages it seems like a good, realistic sort of romance—perhaps a bit dark and more than a little angsty, but you can’t expect them to like the sappy kid things forever. And then you get to that page. In excruciating detail a sensual and sexual scene plays out, spilling passionately across the next several pages. You read it, hesitantly at first, and the thought hits you: my child is reading this? The fears begin to swirl—Did, did they read this? Could they be doing—No, they’re too young for this, they’re still—but it dawns on you that they’re nearly sixteen, that so much time has based.
Dawn comes. You nervously dance around the subject, hoping to find some hint, some clue to put your worries to rest. You’ve never thought about your kid’s sex life. You don’t want to think about your kid even having a sex life. I mean, you want them to be happy and get married someday, but… Hell, it was hard enough just giving them “the talk.” You’re tempted to sneak into their room at some point and dig around, knowing that if you find something it’ll feel as though your world is falling apart and if you don’t the paranoia will only keep gnawing at you. You decide you don’t want to be that sort of parent, so you ask them about the book, and you ask them about who they’re dating and, ever so gently, you ask if they’ve been doing any “funny stuff.” You hate to phrase it that way—it always annoyed you when your parents did stuff like that—but you find it hard to just spit out what you really mean in front of your only child. They look at you strangely for a moment and then blush and look a way, mumbling a soft, “I don’t know,” the sort of “I don’t know” that you know really means, “Yes, but I don’t want to admit it.”
For a moment you feel light-headed, maybe even a little sick. Worry seeps into you—are they using protection, what if there’s a pregnancy, do they even love this person or are they just being used? You don’t want them to be hurt, and that fear, that fear of pregnancy, of disease, of youthful irresponsibility, it plagues you and makes you worry that their entire future could come crashing down just because of one stupid mistake. You think back to the book and you think about how you raised them—or wanted to raise them anyway. For a moment you feel as though you could cry, thinking about all the time you’ve missed and how, if only you had been there, then maybe… But your thoughts return to the book. It’s easier to wrap your mind around that, around those sultry pages and the influence they must have had on your child. You can imagine it now as they read these pages and then whisper to their partner—“Hey, this seems fun; let’s try this!” And there, in one fell action, goes all the innocence of the little baby you’ve spent nearly sixteen years raising. You can’t help but feel a little angry—how did they even get this book, who on earth would have let a child read this?
You want to do something, anything, to fix the situation, but you’re tired and torn in so many directions as it is, so all you can think of is the book, that stupid book! If only, if only—and then you see it, that library sticker, and you find a name and a face to put to your anger. In a bit of spare time you call up the library, demanding to know why they let your child check out a book like this and why, for that matter, they’re even carrying this, this smut. But all the librarian on the other end does is talk about how it’s the parent’s duty to watch their kids before giving you some stilted and practiced spiel about intellectual freedom. Honestly, who the hell cares, your kid is off having sex and destroying their future and it’s all their fault! You would have been there if you could have—you wanted to be—but instead you had to trust the school and the library and, and now they’ve betrayed you! You’re furious and demand the book be removed and before long you find yourself wrapped up in challenging material.
Let’s take a moment to switch to the perspective of the librarian at the other end of that phone call. It’s been a long day. You already had one book returned with what appeared to be—what you hope to have just been—soup dripping through all the pages. On top of that you caught one person trying to steal DVDs out of their cases, and, best of all, you had one creepy man in a trench coat leering over the children’s section. You’re tired and just waiting for the clock to strike the hour and let you go free.
And then it happens.
The phone rings. On the other end some person launches immediately into a tirade and you can’t help but just roll your eyes. They stabbing you with a thousand questions about a classic piece of young adult literature, noted for its mature and complex exploration of the issues of sexuality in those awkward teenage years that so many other novels refuse to even acknowledge. You rub your forehead and wish you could just tell them to actually pay attention to their damn kids and take responsibility rather than trying shove off on you and the library. But you’re a professional so, tired as you are, you try to calm them down and explain that the library isn’t responsible for policing what people read—you merely provide the books and it’s up to the readers to decide what they do and don’t want to read. This only seems to make them angrier. You quietly wish to yourself that this place could be rid of these sorts of idiots--“Oh, won’t anyone think of the children!” you think to yourself with no small amount of sarcasm, “Can’t they understand how important this book is, how it speaks to so many people and helps them understand these issues in ways that make them better for it? I mean honestly, how can they call this smut? That’s just so prudish, so small-minded. They’re probably one of those crazy evangelicals trying to force their puritanical beliefs on the rest of us.”
The person on the other end demands—no, threatens to have the book pulled from the library. You pause and wish you could just hang the phone up then and there. But, you explain the role of the library in protecting intellectual freedom, that if you pulled every book that people disagreed with then you’d be limiting people’s potential and the freedom of knowledge. The library has no place controlling what people can and can’t read. If they as a parent wish to take the book away from the kid then so be it but don’t try to force responsibility onto the library. They’re the parent, they’re the ones who need to be raising their kid. The library just needs to provide access to information, the more the better. You wish again that people could understand what seems so patently obvious to you, that freedom of information is a net positive but once you stop chopping pieces off of that then you start moving toward the creepy sort of dictatorship of thought where a small cabal of people decides what people can and cannot read and, by extension, what is and isn’t true.
The person on the other end doesn’t seem to have been assuaged. You can’t help but feel they’re acting irrational and just trying to blame you to make their own selves feel better. You keep a polite and professional tone but all the same the call ends. You have a feeling this could turn serious and so report it to your director as you assemble a defense, hoping an impassioned argument for freedom of information, parental responsibility, and literary value will win the day, all while wishing so very much that people like this would just go away and make the world a better place.
We’ve all been in that librarian’s position where we’re tired and annoyed and some random person just pops into our lives with the seemingly sole aim of causing trouble. We view and understand this person purely in our context, and this all too human habit is often the source of miscommunication and conflict. Knowing as we do the story of the person on the other side in this case, we can be a little more sympathetic to them and understand where they’re coming from even if we don’t agree with them. They may still be wrong, and they may be trying to blame the book to steady their own life, but they’re not just doing it because they’re some anti-intellectual book burning bible-thumping fanatic; rather it’s because they’re human with human concerns born out of their particular context. This is what’s key to keep in mind. It can be hard when you only know that person as the angry voice on the phone or a briefly met stranger, but as a librarian, as a public servant, it’s your duty to listen and sympathize and try to understand people. This doesn’t at all mean you have to agree with them, but if you don’t try to understand where they’re coming from or why they’re angry—and it’s no good just subbing in stereotypes here—then you won’t be able to work with them on a human level to find workable solutions rather than riling conflicts.
It’s worth taking a step back to try to understand the psychology of censorship though, so as to better understand why it exists at all. We think of it as the purview of totalitarian regimes and frothing luddites, but the truth is we all engage in censorship. Let’s take the case of Michael Pearl’s To Train Up a Child, a book bathed in infamy, tied to several cases of child abuse and even death, children who were “trained” to the point of being broken. To quote the opening of a Slate article on the matter:
"On the night of May 11, 2011, sometime around midnight, 13-year-old Hana Williams fell face-forward in her parents’ backyard. Adopted from Ethiopia three years before, Hana was naked and severely underweight. Her head had recently been shaved, and her body bore the scars of repeated beatings with a plastic plumbing hose. Inside the house, her adoptive mother, 42-year-old Carri Williams, and a number of Hana’s eight siblings had been peering out the window for the past few hours, watching as Hana staggered and thrashed around, removed her clothing in what is known as hypothermic paradoxical undressing and fell repeatedly, hitting her head. According to Hana’s brother Immanuel, a deaf 10-year-old also adopted from Ethiopia, the family appeared to be laughing at her."[2]
Tell me, is this the sort of material you want to be carrying in your library? Is this the sort of service you want to be providing for parents looking for information on raising children? Could a library that provided such a book be in some way complicit in the tragedy that followed, by providing information that corrupted and tortured? Freedom of information sounds good on paper, but in practice it can turn bloody and worse.
There are whole ranges of books that considered destructive in one way or another. Would taking these books away be so bad? Would it not be for the better? Would it not improve society if they were gotten rid of? Think of the children that could be spared, the lives that could be saved and made better. And now you understand in some way the psychology of censorship.
Censorship doesn’t seek to deny simply for the sake of denial. It denies out of a sincere belief that the act of denial is for the greater good, that it’s improving society by removing something that would be toxic to the well-being of the whole. For the religiously minded this often comes down to censoring the sexual because, in their minds, this material is destructive and leads kids to make poor decisions, introducing ideas into them which they believe might otherwise be carefully controlled and moderated. They’re not doing it because they sincerely believe that it’s right, that removing this material will improve society by leading to more stable and better marriages and families while reducing teen pregnancies. Even totalitarian regimes take up the charge of censorship with the best of intentions, seeking to preserve the purity of the revolution from the corrupting influence of the bourgeoisie, for example—it’s for their own good.
It’s not hard to fault these views—books alone don’t make people abusive, as those issues run far deeper than the page—but the point isn’t to debate whether they’re valid: it’s to understand the psychology behind them, the why of censorship. Once you understand why people seek censorship you can begin to engage and dialogue with them. In their own way they want the best for society—so work with that. Don’t just say that freedom of information is invaluable, but explain to them why a book dealing with complex issues of sexuality might actually be good for teens by allowing them to understand and explore issues in a safe way. Research and discover the truth and then distill that into something easily discussed and understood. Sit down with them and explain to them that you understand their concerns, ask them to express why they feel censoring this or that work is for the best, and then calmly explain your own perspective. You don’t have to win them over to your way of thinking, but it can be enough to help them understand where the other side is coming from and why, just maybe, this work would be worth keeping on the shelves.
It may not always work, but people are far more amenable when they feel they’re being listened to and respected, when they get the chance to express themselves and a chance to learn. So when next faced with censorship, take the time to listen and take the time to prepare. Tell them you’d like to sit down with them first and have a dialogue with them—not as the enemy, but as a human being who wants the best for their community. If you regard them that way, as human rather than enemy, then you can work with them and they with you, but as soon as you decide to take the path of conflict there can be no end save for battle devolving into a war where one side has to win and the community tears itself apart. Libraries are meant to unite, not divide, and to serve all in the community. This doesn’t mean we have to give up what’s important to us, but it does mean we need to listen, be open, and work with people rather than against them, all so that we can find the best possible solution.
[1] It should be noted here that more than a few libraries see their mission more as one of collecting and providing books, but this is a terribly passive thing which paints the librarian as a crotchety old guardian of classical tomes who would just as well chase everyone out of their library so as to be alone with their books. A library devoted to books instead of people is one that will steadily find itself irrelevant and extinct, and while it’s tempting to explore this issue more deeply, that would be a paper unto itself.
[2] Joyce, Kathryn. " Hana's Story: An adoptee's tragic fate, and how it could happen again." Slate.com. Slate, 2013. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/11/hana_williams_the_tragic_death_of_an_ethiopian_adoptee_and_how_it_could.html
So, should we just give in to every challenge and be at the whim of the community? No; rather, the ideal is one of balance and communication. The people on the other side of the issue—of any issue really—are, in fact, people with lives and reasons behind what they do. It’s easy, as is all-too-often seen in the realm of politics, to simply dismiss or demean the other side, to see them as people trying to “destroy America,” or otherwise ruin the state of things like some strangely selfish and self-destructive creatures. Indeed this is the creed of conflict, to dehumanize one’s opponents to make it easier to fight them, and as politics has shown this doesn’t lead to a particularly happy or harmonious society, but rather one that acts as though it’s in constant conflict.
The goal then is to understand and communicate, learning when to fight a battle, when to compromise, and when the other side may actually be right. Let’s take a theoretical example: You’re a single parent working hard to raise and take care of your child while making enough to support the both of you. You’d like to spend more time with your child but work really doesn’t allow that, and much as you’d like to work less you’re barely surviving as it is. You want to have more of a role in your child’s life and want to be able to guide and teach them, but as it is you feel as though you have to turn them over to school, their peers, television, and society at large and hope for the best. You want them to be safe, to grow up well, to avoid drugs and have a life better than your own, to have more of a chance, more of an opportunity.
You arrive home late one night—let’s be honest, you get home late every night—and find your child already asleep. Their books are splayed across the table in that most haphazard of fashions and, on a whim, you pick one up. Flipping through the pages it seems like a good, realistic sort of romance—perhaps a bit dark and more than a little angsty, but you can’t expect them to like the sappy kid things forever. And then you get to that page. In excruciating detail a sensual and sexual scene plays out, spilling passionately across the next several pages. You read it, hesitantly at first, and the thought hits you: my child is reading this? The fears begin to swirl—Did, did they read this? Could they be doing—No, they’re too young for this, they’re still—but it dawns on you that they’re nearly sixteen, that so much time has based.
Dawn comes. You nervously dance around the subject, hoping to find some hint, some clue to put your worries to rest. You’ve never thought about your kid’s sex life. You don’t want to think about your kid even having a sex life. I mean, you want them to be happy and get married someday, but… Hell, it was hard enough just giving them “the talk.” You’re tempted to sneak into their room at some point and dig around, knowing that if you find something it’ll feel as though your world is falling apart and if you don’t the paranoia will only keep gnawing at you. You decide you don’t want to be that sort of parent, so you ask them about the book, and you ask them about who they’re dating and, ever so gently, you ask if they’ve been doing any “funny stuff.” You hate to phrase it that way—it always annoyed you when your parents did stuff like that—but you find it hard to just spit out what you really mean in front of your only child. They look at you strangely for a moment and then blush and look a way, mumbling a soft, “I don’t know,” the sort of “I don’t know” that you know really means, “Yes, but I don’t want to admit it.”
For a moment you feel light-headed, maybe even a little sick. Worry seeps into you—are they using protection, what if there’s a pregnancy, do they even love this person or are they just being used? You don’t want them to be hurt, and that fear, that fear of pregnancy, of disease, of youthful irresponsibility, it plagues you and makes you worry that their entire future could come crashing down just because of one stupid mistake. You think back to the book and you think about how you raised them—or wanted to raise them anyway. For a moment you feel as though you could cry, thinking about all the time you’ve missed and how, if only you had been there, then maybe… But your thoughts return to the book. It’s easier to wrap your mind around that, around those sultry pages and the influence they must have had on your child. You can imagine it now as they read these pages and then whisper to their partner—“Hey, this seems fun; let’s try this!” And there, in one fell action, goes all the innocence of the little baby you’ve spent nearly sixteen years raising. You can’t help but feel a little angry—how did they even get this book, who on earth would have let a child read this?
You want to do something, anything, to fix the situation, but you’re tired and torn in so many directions as it is, so all you can think of is the book, that stupid book! If only, if only—and then you see it, that library sticker, and you find a name and a face to put to your anger. In a bit of spare time you call up the library, demanding to know why they let your child check out a book like this and why, for that matter, they’re even carrying this, this smut. But all the librarian on the other end does is talk about how it’s the parent’s duty to watch their kids before giving you some stilted and practiced spiel about intellectual freedom. Honestly, who the hell cares, your kid is off having sex and destroying their future and it’s all their fault! You would have been there if you could have—you wanted to be—but instead you had to trust the school and the library and, and now they’ve betrayed you! You’re furious and demand the book be removed and before long you find yourself wrapped up in challenging material.
Let’s take a moment to switch to the perspective of the librarian at the other end of that phone call. It’s been a long day. You already had one book returned with what appeared to be—what you hope to have just been—soup dripping through all the pages. On top of that you caught one person trying to steal DVDs out of their cases, and, best of all, you had one creepy man in a trench coat leering over the children’s section. You’re tired and just waiting for the clock to strike the hour and let you go free.
And then it happens.
The phone rings. On the other end some person launches immediately into a tirade and you can’t help but just roll your eyes. They stabbing you with a thousand questions about a classic piece of young adult literature, noted for its mature and complex exploration of the issues of sexuality in those awkward teenage years that so many other novels refuse to even acknowledge. You rub your forehead and wish you could just tell them to actually pay attention to their damn kids and take responsibility rather than trying shove off on you and the library. But you’re a professional so, tired as you are, you try to calm them down and explain that the library isn’t responsible for policing what people read—you merely provide the books and it’s up to the readers to decide what they do and don’t want to read. This only seems to make them angrier. You quietly wish to yourself that this place could be rid of these sorts of idiots--“Oh, won’t anyone think of the children!” you think to yourself with no small amount of sarcasm, “Can’t they understand how important this book is, how it speaks to so many people and helps them understand these issues in ways that make them better for it? I mean honestly, how can they call this smut? That’s just so prudish, so small-minded. They’re probably one of those crazy evangelicals trying to force their puritanical beliefs on the rest of us.”
The person on the other end demands—no, threatens to have the book pulled from the library. You pause and wish you could just hang the phone up then and there. But, you explain the role of the library in protecting intellectual freedom, that if you pulled every book that people disagreed with then you’d be limiting people’s potential and the freedom of knowledge. The library has no place controlling what people can and can’t read. If they as a parent wish to take the book away from the kid then so be it but don’t try to force responsibility onto the library. They’re the parent, they’re the ones who need to be raising their kid. The library just needs to provide access to information, the more the better. You wish again that people could understand what seems so patently obvious to you, that freedom of information is a net positive but once you stop chopping pieces off of that then you start moving toward the creepy sort of dictatorship of thought where a small cabal of people decides what people can and cannot read and, by extension, what is and isn’t true.
The person on the other end doesn’t seem to have been assuaged. You can’t help but feel they’re acting irrational and just trying to blame you to make their own selves feel better. You keep a polite and professional tone but all the same the call ends. You have a feeling this could turn serious and so report it to your director as you assemble a defense, hoping an impassioned argument for freedom of information, parental responsibility, and literary value will win the day, all while wishing so very much that people like this would just go away and make the world a better place.
We’ve all been in that librarian’s position where we’re tired and annoyed and some random person just pops into our lives with the seemingly sole aim of causing trouble. We view and understand this person purely in our context, and this all too human habit is often the source of miscommunication and conflict. Knowing as we do the story of the person on the other side in this case, we can be a little more sympathetic to them and understand where they’re coming from even if we don’t agree with them. They may still be wrong, and they may be trying to blame the book to steady their own life, but they’re not just doing it because they’re some anti-intellectual book burning bible-thumping fanatic; rather it’s because they’re human with human concerns born out of their particular context. This is what’s key to keep in mind. It can be hard when you only know that person as the angry voice on the phone or a briefly met stranger, but as a librarian, as a public servant, it’s your duty to listen and sympathize and try to understand people. This doesn’t at all mean you have to agree with them, but if you don’t try to understand where they’re coming from or why they’re angry—and it’s no good just subbing in stereotypes here—then you won’t be able to work with them on a human level to find workable solutions rather than riling conflicts.
It’s worth taking a step back to try to understand the psychology of censorship though, so as to better understand why it exists at all. We think of it as the purview of totalitarian regimes and frothing luddites, but the truth is we all engage in censorship. Let’s take the case of Michael Pearl’s To Train Up a Child, a book bathed in infamy, tied to several cases of child abuse and even death, children who were “trained” to the point of being broken. To quote the opening of a Slate article on the matter:
"On the night of May 11, 2011, sometime around midnight, 13-year-old Hana Williams fell face-forward in her parents’ backyard. Adopted from Ethiopia three years before, Hana was naked and severely underweight. Her head had recently been shaved, and her body bore the scars of repeated beatings with a plastic plumbing hose. Inside the house, her adoptive mother, 42-year-old Carri Williams, and a number of Hana’s eight siblings had been peering out the window for the past few hours, watching as Hana staggered and thrashed around, removed her clothing in what is known as hypothermic paradoxical undressing and fell repeatedly, hitting her head. According to Hana’s brother Immanuel, a deaf 10-year-old also adopted from Ethiopia, the family appeared to be laughing at her."[2]
Tell me, is this the sort of material you want to be carrying in your library? Is this the sort of service you want to be providing for parents looking for information on raising children? Could a library that provided such a book be in some way complicit in the tragedy that followed, by providing information that corrupted and tortured? Freedom of information sounds good on paper, but in practice it can turn bloody and worse.
There are whole ranges of books that considered destructive in one way or another. Would taking these books away be so bad? Would it not be for the better? Would it not improve society if they were gotten rid of? Think of the children that could be spared, the lives that could be saved and made better. And now you understand in some way the psychology of censorship.
Censorship doesn’t seek to deny simply for the sake of denial. It denies out of a sincere belief that the act of denial is for the greater good, that it’s improving society by removing something that would be toxic to the well-being of the whole. For the religiously minded this often comes down to censoring the sexual because, in their minds, this material is destructive and leads kids to make poor decisions, introducing ideas into them which they believe might otherwise be carefully controlled and moderated. They’re not doing it because they sincerely believe that it’s right, that removing this material will improve society by leading to more stable and better marriages and families while reducing teen pregnancies. Even totalitarian regimes take up the charge of censorship with the best of intentions, seeking to preserve the purity of the revolution from the corrupting influence of the bourgeoisie, for example—it’s for their own good.
It’s not hard to fault these views—books alone don’t make people abusive, as those issues run far deeper than the page—but the point isn’t to debate whether they’re valid: it’s to understand the psychology behind them, the why of censorship. Once you understand why people seek censorship you can begin to engage and dialogue with them. In their own way they want the best for society—so work with that. Don’t just say that freedom of information is invaluable, but explain to them why a book dealing with complex issues of sexuality might actually be good for teens by allowing them to understand and explore issues in a safe way. Research and discover the truth and then distill that into something easily discussed and understood. Sit down with them and explain to them that you understand their concerns, ask them to express why they feel censoring this or that work is for the best, and then calmly explain your own perspective. You don’t have to win them over to your way of thinking, but it can be enough to help them understand where the other side is coming from and why, just maybe, this work would be worth keeping on the shelves.
It may not always work, but people are far more amenable when they feel they’re being listened to and respected, when they get the chance to express themselves and a chance to learn. So when next faced with censorship, take the time to listen and take the time to prepare. Tell them you’d like to sit down with them first and have a dialogue with them—not as the enemy, but as a human being who wants the best for their community. If you regard them that way, as human rather than enemy, then you can work with them and they with you, but as soon as you decide to take the path of conflict there can be no end save for battle devolving into a war where one side has to win and the community tears itself apart. Libraries are meant to unite, not divide, and to serve all in the community. This doesn’t mean we have to give up what’s important to us, but it does mean we need to listen, be open, and work with people rather than against them, all so that we can find the best possible solution.
[1] It should be noted here that more than a few libraries see their mission more as one of collecting and providing books, but this is a terribly passive thing which paints the librarian as a crotchety old guardian of classical tomes who would just as well chase everyone out of their library so as to be alone with their books. A library devoted to books instead of people is one that will steadily find itself irrelevant and extinct, and while it’s tempting to explore this issue more deeply, that would be a paper unto itself.
[2] Joyce, Kathryn. " Hana's Story: An adoptee's tragic fate, and how it could happen again." Slate.com. Slate, 2013. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/11/hana_williams_the_tragic_death_of_an_ethiopian_adoptee_and_how_it_could.html