Yes, A Child Called "It" Is Banned!

Dave Pelzer was the target of one of the worst cases of child abuse in California history. His mother starved him, burned him on a stove, forced him to drink ammonia, and treated him as less than human while his brothers lived normal lives in the same house. He was rescued by school officials at age twelve. Pelzer wrote A Child Called “It” as the first volume of a trilogy documenting his childhood, and it spent six years on the New York Times bestseller list.

The memoir has been challenged repeatedly for its graphic descriptions of abuse. Schools in Georgia, Texas, New York, Indiana, and Florida have pulled it from libraries and curricula. Objections center on the violence being too disturbing for young readers, along with profanity and a passage where the young Dave briefly gives up on God. The irony runs deep: the book describes real events that happened to a real child, and the discomfort readers feel is precisely the discomfort that allowed the abuse to continue for years.

Why You Should Read This

A Child Called “It” is not an easy read. Pelzer’s descriptions of what his mother did to him are specific and visceral: the hunger, the beatings, the psychological warfare of being treated as a non-person in your own home. He wrote it plainly, without literary flourish, which makes it hit harder. There’s no distance between you and the events.

The book matters because it forces a confrontation with something most people would rather not think about. Child abuse thrives in silence, in the assumption that what happens inside a family stays there, that someone else will notice, that it can’t really be that bad. Pelzer’s memoir strips away every comfortable assumption. Teachers, neighbors, and family members all had opportunities to intervene and mostly didn’t. Reading it won’t give you closure. It’ll give you awareness, and that’s more useful.