Author Arrested for Book, Authorities Cite "Child Porn"

slhuang

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This is in Canada, and right now the only English-language source covering it that anyone I know can seem to find is Vice: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/...h-child-porn-over-hansel-and-gretel-retelling (A friend found other sources in the Quebec press, but in French. The lack of coverage feels really weird...)

Last April, Quebec author Yvan Godbout and his publisher Nycolas Doucet were charged with producing and distributing child pornography. The charges against them stem from a single paragraph in one of Godbout’s novels, a dark retelling of Hansel and Gretel, in which a father sexually assaults his daughter. Godbout and Doucet were arrested in March 2019, after a reader came upon the passage and called the authorities. The work was not marketed to children, contains no explicit visual images, a content warning was printed on the back, and the scene is meant to be horrifying, not erotic.

I'm not Canadian and don't tend to write a lot of explicit content, but I still find this extremely concerning. I feel like it could in particular have ramifications for 95% of YA.
 
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Sonya Heaney

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I read Elizabeth Scott's Living Dead Girl the other day (a much more disturbing read than I remember signing up for!). The *entire book* is about an underage girl living with a paedophile, and it was published by Simon and Schuster … I don't know anything about Canadian law, but the book you mention doesn't sound anywhere near as disturbing as Scott's. I just checked and you can still buy hers on Amazon CA. Strange.

I can think of so much YA and NA that would be banned under those conditions. (Doesn't Fifty Shades of Grey have some sort of paedophilic side character?)

ETA: And, unlike the other book, Living Dead Girl *is* YA.
 
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cmhbob

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To convict Godbout and Doucet, the prosecution will have to show, first of all, that the passage in Godbout’s work could conceivably incite a pedophile to commit a contact crime.

That's rather chilling to think about. How in the world could they prove that?
 

aurora borealis

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That's rather chilling to think about. How in the world could they prove that?

I'm not sure how they would do that. The Vice article also says that if they did they would then need to prove that this novel cannot reasonably be seen as art, which isn't exactly going to be easy.

I'm really not sure how the prosecutors think they can win this. It seems like a very major violation of freedom of speech and I hope for all of us that he's found not guilty.
 

Ari Meermans

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Gonna give a warning here: Phrases like "social whack jobs" and slams against libraries are right out.
 

gothicangel

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Personally, I think there is a line. The opening of The Color Purple comes to mind and for me, that is sitting right on the line. I am assuming that it is a graphic description of a child rape, which to me goes well over the line. This can be tackled through thoughts and feelings of a victim without being graphic. Also, being a UK citizen I am not aware of Canadian laws on child pornography.

I don't see why this should be an issue for YA in which consensual sex is part of the story.
 

neandermagnon

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UK law enforcement and child protection agencies no longer use words/phrases like "child pornography" and instead call it what it is: images/videos of children being sexual abused. Basically, children don't produce it, children can't consent to being involved in it in any capacity and children are not the target audience. The children who are involved in it are the victims of horrific crimes (and the law enforcement work very hard to identify them and rescue them when they investigate any crime involving such images/videos). Hence calling it what it is not hiding it behind a vague term which could be misinterpreted. Going by the fact that someone has decided that a fictional account of child abuse is the same thing, it's clear to me that the term "child pornography" is indeed frequently misinterpreted and all the more reason not to use the term at all.

I think the Canadian authorities should follow suit and change the wording of the laws, and then there'd be less risk of confusion between fictional accounts of child sex abuse written as part of a horror story (for which "child pornography" isn't an accurate label either) and media depicting actual real children being abused.