Children's book seen as worse than its title admits.

(From Canberra Times)

O NE SURE way to make a book desirable is to ban it. This is what has begun to happen with The Bad Book by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton. A kind of fatwa has been declared and Griffiths is facing ridicule and the withdrawal of his work. The trouble began for The Bad Book when two women staff members at Our Lady of the Pines, a Catholic primary school in Melbourne, took exception to the book's content. In a complaint to the publisher, Pan Macmillan, they objected to the mild swearing in the book and the use of words like ''bum''. The underpinning black humour was read as some kind of encouragement to hurt others.

Now other schools and some libraries are removing the book from display. A few bookshops, nervous about being seen to promote something controversial, in both NSW and Victoria are not encouraging readers to buy the book. The reason is clear. Griffiths in The Bad Book, gets down and dirty with kids and they love it. Like Roald Dahl - who began making the unspeakable fun - Griffiths says it's OK to ''think the unthinkable and entertain the impossible''. Reaction to The Bad Book points to a glaring double standard. Children, through the Internet, computer and video games, are often exposed to pornography, but parents do not mount a campaign to ban them. Why? Authors are easy targets. They are not removed by the click of a mouse. It is hard to understand why some parents would want to ban a book when it is widely accepted that boys in particular are sometimes hard to motivate to read. And boys love Andy Griffiths. He talks their language and writes what they want to read. But the fuss over The Bad Book raises a thorny issue: whether some books should be rated in a similar way to films and television. Child-protection advocate Professor Freda Briggs said in January that books should carry some kind of classification or national rating system.

''We're more interested in the content of a chocolate bar than we are in the content of what is feeding our children's brains,'' she said.

Briggs, an emeritus professor at the University of South Australia, has hit upon what is behind the unease over Andy ...