WTF?
Holy poop on a stick, do people actually not remember being teenagers?
In the wake of the "Oh noes, YA books are too graphic and icky" kerfuffle, you've got people suggesting that books carry ratings labels.
That is a brilliant idea. Teenagers will see that A or R or whatever and say, "Oh, I better not read that."
They will of course not immediately try to purchase that book, or check it out from the library. And if thwarted, the one thing they absolutely will never try to do is steal it. Because teens, you know, they're the most rules-following age group. They never do anything risky. They obey their elders, rich with wisdom, because they know that is the very best way to grow up safe and sound.
When I was 13 and someone discovered--in the school library--this book, we of course immediately reported it to the librarian. We did not pass it around all the 12- and 13-year-old girls, with the most explicit pages dog-eared. We didn't read it out loud to each other behind the school, giggling. Those girls who did, why, they all grew up to be crack hos and had three babies each by the time they were seventeen. Yep, that's exactly what happened.
None of us read Flowers in the Attic, either. Or Clan of the Cave Bear. Or Maia. I am told by reliable adults that those books contain incest, child abuse, graphic rape, and graphic more-or-less consentual sex. But I wouldn't know because, being a good little white girl from a stable family with a good income, it would never have occurred to me to read those, because I know my poor little sheltered brain would have just EXPLODED when I got to those scenes. I would have dissolved into a puddle of tears and hysteria and run to my mother and confessed what I did.
Yep, that's exactly how it happened. Good thing I didn't read those when I was 13. I might not have grown up into the successful, law-abiding person I am today. If I had read those books, I'm sure I would have become some sort of career criminal or terrible loser-failure, because those books would have totally undermined all the good my parents did for me. Wow, I really dodged that bullet!