Yes, Scars Is Banned!

Scars tells the story of Kendra, a fifteen-year-old who uses self-harm to cope with memories of childhood sexual abuse she can’t fully access. As she begins therapy and tries to piece together what happened to her, she also discovers her talent for art and begins a relationship with another girl. The novel draws directly from author Cheryl Rainfield’s own experiences as a survivor. Published by WestSide Books in 2010, it handles extraordinarily painful subject matter with care and specificity.

The book has been banned across Texas for what challengers have variously called “pornography,” “incest,” and even “Marxism.” North East ISD and Granbury ISD in Texas removed it from school libraries in 2022 and 2023. Brevard County in Florida and Wentzville in Missouri followed. Rainfield has spoken publicly about how painful it is to watch a book written to help survivors get labeled as the thing it’s fighting against. The bans target the sexual content and depictions of self-harm, though the novel explicitly shows self-harm as something destructive that Kendra works to overcome, not something to emulate.

Why You Should Read This

This is a hard book. It deals with child sexual abuse and self-injury, and it doesn’t look away. Rainfield wrote it because the book she needed as a teenager didn’t exist. She survived years of ritual abuse and used self-harm to cope, and she poured that knowledge into Kendra’s story so other kids in that darkness would know they weren’t alone.

Banning Scars doesn’t protect anyone. The teenagers who need this book are already living what it describes. Taking it off the shelf just tells them, again, that what happened to them is too shameful to talk about. Rainfield’s writing is raw and honest and, according to readers who’ve written to her, genuinely life-saving. That’s not hyperbole. When a book about healing gets banned because it acknowledges the wound, something has gone badly wrong with how we think about protecting kids.