Imagine this:

It's 7:58 pm, 1954. You're born in a small hospital after eighteen hours of labor into the arms of a nineteen-year-old, unconscious but unconditionally loving mother. You're told many times in the years to follow that that day was one of the happiest of your parents' lives: the day their first daughter was born.

You grow up in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a town American by geography but French Canadian by heart and soul. You speak English when you're at school, French when you answer your father's phone, and both at the dinner table. Your mother pushes relentlessly to rid you and your two sisters of the name Canuck, the derogatory term used to insult French Canadians. It won't be until much later that you work just as hard to reclaim that piece of your childhood culture.

For the most part, you are a happy kid. Happy but confused. You know, or at least you're fairly certain, that your parents love you, but sometimes you wonder if the things that go on inside your house--the incessant screaming, beating, crying, and fear--happen in every home in your neighborhood. At age eight, you write a letter to your future self, saying: "Never forget how it feels to be a little kid with a crazy mean daddy."

But you get through it. School is your escape, and the nuns at École Jesus Marie are kind. You feel guilty lying that you don't have shorts for gym, but you don't want them to see the bruises on your legs. You're permitted to skip first grade, and when the time comes for high school you convince your parents to send you to a more expensive academy forty-five minutes away. You graduate as a National Merit Semifinalist and choose Wellesley College from a long list of acceptance letters. There you find your passion for art and transfer to Bard College your sophomore year. No one knows you are battling severe depression.

You meet Barry, the love of your life, and between him and your painting you are happier than you've ever been. You go backpacking west through the Adirondacks, Canada, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana before returning to Manhattan and getting married. The experience gives you a husband, a baby, and inspiration for your art.

But four kids, a move to Santa Fe, countless exhibitions, and a decade later, you come down with a strange illness. No doctor can explain or remedy the piercing pain in your head or the horrible nightmares. You finally turn to spiritual healers, and eventually discover you are struggling to come to terms with the trauma you faced as a child. It won't be until your youngest, your daughter, is entering high school that you are able to fully face the abuse and to let go. 

Your name is Charleen Touchette, and in 2004 at the age of fifty, you publish It Stops With Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl. You have just released your personal and powerful story for all the world to read.

A year later, you receive a call. There has been a request to remove it from the Woonsocket Harris Public Library. What's worse, the challenger is your father.

He is quoted by both local and national newspapers as stating: "If members of a family wish to harm one another, those actions should be kept private and should not draw in others by involving matters of public policy."

To add insult to injury, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, where you, your husband, and your sister graduated, joins in and agrees with your father that domestic violence should remain a private matter. He is quoted as saying that your book "does not deserve First Amendment protection."

Thankfully, you are a member of various author and library associations and manage to launch a letter-writing campaign against the ban. After several months, your memoir is back on the shelves in your hometown. Your father refuses to comment for the press.

Child abuse isn't pretty, but it happens. On average, a report of child abuse is made every ten seconds. That means that in the time it's taken to read this, approximately thirty cases have been reported and countless others should have been but instead, someone kept silent. Is this really out of respect for the abuser's "privacy"?

There are so many horrible ironies in this situation, but the most blatant is the comment Leon Botstein made concerning the First Amendment, which, if you're unaware, is the one guaranteeing freedom of speech and press among other things. By complaining, he is essentially suggesting that Touchette had no right to write about her experiences. The most obvious contradiction to this is that by writing It Stops With Me, she not only completed her own process of healing but also gave voices to the millions of children and adults who were never able to speak out against their abuse.

Keeping violence a "private matter" is giving permission for it continue.

But there are other defenses as well, ones you can't find unless you read this powerful book. What I most admired about Touchette was how utterly forgiving she was towards her father and her situation. Looking back on old photographs, she would never fail to comment on the "deep sadness" in his eyes. The few times she did accuse him of being abusive were immediately followed by sentences explaining why it wasn't his fault. His parents likely abused him, and their parents and their parents and on and on. "...[I]t took generations to make a man like Archie," she said on one of the last pages. She was also very laid-back when she addressed the abuse itself. She let the descriptions of her nightmares and some of her included artwork speak for itself. Never once did she use the word rape, even though it would have been entirely appropriate. If anything, her father should have felt deep gratitude to have such an empathetic daughter.

The worst irony of all, however, did not become apparent to me until the very last paragraph, which reads as follows:

"How did it get to the point where men and women are at war, and their children are the swords they wield against each other? It is not just about my family and my ancestry. I don't know where it started, but I do know where it is ending. It is stopping right here with me. I choose a different legacy for my children to pass generation to generation. I was not the first girl to be abused in my family. But I will be the first to say, c'est fini. No more. It stops here with me."

If that doesn't make it clear that she was in no way promoting or encouraging child abuse but trying to prevent it, then nothing will. If simply reading an account of such horrible things makes someone want to go out and do them or support them or keep them private, then banning a little-known book like this is beyond pointless. I feel genuinely sorry for these people because they cannot appreciate banned books such as Charleen Touchette's It Stops With Me.

Stop the banning of books: read them!