Latest child abuse book removed but others remain

[trigger warning for survivors of child sexual assault]

After a global protest and threats of boycott, on-line bookseller Amazon removed The Pedophile’s Guide to Love & Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct from its site yesterday.

The book endorses sexual crimes against children.

The E. book by Phillip R. Greaves, which was available for Amazon’s Kindle electronic reader, is an instructional manual which teaches pedophiles how to break the law so as to avoid getting, caught or so as to attract ‘liter’ [sic] sentences” if they are caught.

In using the term ‘pedosexuals’, the book asserts that the sexual abuse of children (often their own children) is simply a sexual preference. The idea is that pedophiles are a misunderstood sexual minority who ‘love’ children. The book compares the plight of pedophiles to the plight of Jews in World War 2.  This is a deadly idea that covers up the reality of what is being promoted: the rape of children.

The book advises on how to find products similar to condoms for ‘boys younger than thirteen’. It gives advice on the best way to use images of children as ‘masturbation material’. It suggests the use of ‘any children you have actually been with, in the past’ in fantasies.

In its initial statement,  Amazon said it “believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable. Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchase.”

Yet Amazon’s own policies  prohibit content of certain kinds, including “offensive material,” as well as content that “may lead to the production of an illegal item or illegal activity.”

Perhaps teaching men how to rape children and get away with it just wasn’t offensive enough?

A word about the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Here’s what it says:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

This only explicitly refers to Congress making laws on speech, not state laws and not local regulations, but the way the Amendment has been interpreted however means that it is now broader in scope. However, rather than conferring a right to free speech on the part of individuals or companies, it restrains the exercise of certain power by certain (governmental) bodies. Amazon is privately owned, it can largely set its own limits (which it seemed to do, then ignored).

Should ‘freedom of speech’ trump a child’s right to be safe and not be harmed? The promotion of sexual abuse of children should be met with zero tolerance. Children’s rights to safety outweigh a pedophile defender’s ‘right to free speech.’ This book does more than promote, it falls in the legal category of ‘child abuse materials’.

The laws in Australia are aimed against not only “child pornography” but against the wider category of “child abuse material”. As this instruction manual for child abuse is an e- book, it could fall under the prohibition against using a carriage service to access child abuse materials. So this book could be actionable under Australian law.

Those defending this material don’t want any regulations. But in the absence of people regulating themselves, ie. not abusing children and not publishing how-to guides on pedophilia, then regulation is necessary.

It was great to see how one woman’s complaint against Amazon set off a global protest resulting in The Pedophile’s Guide being removed from the site . But that’s just one of the titles to which Amazon links. There are more here.

 Some people ask, how do you draw the line in regulating speech? We draw the line on harm, and we need to hold the line on this.

As published on

Drawing the line on The Morning Show

Here’s my thoughts on the issue on Channel 7s Morning Show this morning. Fiona Patten from The Australian Sex Party appears too.

The Australian Sex Party doesn’t seem to have any issue with  pornography depicting young women as little girls, which also plays into the hands of those who desire to abuse children. I’ve written about that here.

Save the alarm for the real sexualised and exploitative images of children

Is this photo

comparable to these?

Last week I was asked to comment on photos of  little boys, described as reminiscent of the Bill Henson exhibition which included naked young girls and attracted significant controversy in 2008. There was now a “row” over the Melbourne exhibition featuring “naked young boys” holding guns.

The report in the Northcote leader reads:

“A LOCAL exhibition of photographs depicting naked young boys brandishing guns has fuelled claims of child exploitation.

The shots, on display at Fairfield’s New North Gallery, have sparked comparisons with Northcote artist Bill Henson’s controversial pictures of a naked pubescent girl.

Fairfield photographer Sean O’Carroll told the Leader he photographed his son and two nephews, aged two to three, naked and holding replica guns for the exhibition series titled “Boys, Guns Etc?”

A political party and national family group had criticised the exhibition.

So I had a look at the photos. While I understand that seeing images of little boys with bare chests and holding guns is somewhat disconcerting, they are not sexualised images. While there may be concerns about informed consent, these photographs are not remotely comparably to Bill Henson’s images and the comparison should never have been invoked.

The girl who featured naked on the invite to the Roslyn Oxley gallery was 13. While that photo was widely circulated, an even more graphic one of another girl was not. While I have partly covered her, I hesitated to show this second image at all. She is ‘Untitled 1985/86’, quietly auctioned by Menzies Art Brands, Lot 214, for $3800, only weeks after the controversy erupted.

The Henson affair is dissected in the chapter ‘The Gaze that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Bill Henson and Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panics’ by Dr Abigail Bray in Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls. She describes the image:

…the black and white ‘Untitled 1895/86’…peers down on a naked child on the crumpled sheets of a bed, her knees bent, her legs wide open, her face turned away from the camera, her lips parted, her expression blank. She is wearing childish bangles on both arms and an ankle ‘slave’ bangle. Her hair is in a ponytail. Her vagina and budding breasts are highlighted by Henson’s trademark manipulation of shadow. The girl is anonymous. However, to see the ugly sexual political context of Henson’s photographs is to be dismissed a hysteric, prude or worse.

While we need to be vigilant about the sexualisation and exploitation of children, it dilutes the serious concerns and genuine dis-ease about Henson’s sexual depictions of vulnerable naked young girls – and other overtly sexualised imagery of children – to somehow suggest a link between them and the little boys. Not every image of a child without clothes should be read as sexualised. We shouldn’t see child abuse in everything.

In my view, the photos of the boys holding guns juxtaposes their apparent innocence, curiosity, and affection for each other (one boy has an arm slung over his friend), with the harshness of the cold weapons against their skin. It prompts questions about the hijacking of boys by gun culture, about how we raise them on a diet of violence, how we strip them of their tenderness and empathy from the youngest of ages (see my interview with Maggie Hamilton re her new book on boys), how quick we are to mould and shape them in normative (and harmful) versions of masculinity.

I agree with the photographer:

Ultimately, this series demands a response (and asks): How are we to understand and nurture a healthy masculinity in our boys so they may become well-adjusted, happy, beautiful men?”

You can watch the Channel 7 Morning Show piece on the issue below:

Transcript of ABC’s Q&A in which precious minutes are wasted as I try to explain the term ‘skanky hos’

Melinda Tankard Reist: What would have been controversial would have been if Tony Abbott had said: “I want my daughters to be skanky hos.” Then you might have had a controversy.

Satyajit Das: Sorry, what is a “scanty ho”?

Melinda Tankard Reist: Skanky ho. Whore.

Satyajit Das: What is that?

Rebecca Huntley: I’ll show you after.

Satyajit Das: You’re on.

Rebecca Huntley: We’ll just go out.

Barnaby Joyce: It’s a derivative.

Satyajit Das: It’s a derivative?

Lindsay Tanner: It’s a family show.

Satyajit Das: It’s a family show?

Lindsay Tanner: It’s a family show.

Melinda Tankard Reist: It’s a rough term for a loose woman. Skanky whore…

Satyajit Das: Oh, right…

Melinda Tankard Reist: You obviously don’t listen to enough rap music.

Gerard Henderson’s take on Q&A, with special empasis on the skanky ho educational segment.

Interview on 3CR ‘Right Now Radio’

Interview with Mia Freedman about Collective Shout.

Sarah McMahon’s guest blog post ’Promoting gastric banding to 14-year-olds: malnutrition and maintenance on the menu’ reprinted in On Line Opinion. 

Emma Rush’s guest blog post ’The market is eating our children’ repirnted in On Line Opinion.

It was a remarkable case of playing fast and loose with the truth – even by the standards of the Australian Sex Party (ASP).  Kids Free 2B Kids expose on ‘pseudo’ child pornography flooding corner stores, milkbars and petrol stations (including 7-Eleven and McDonald’s-Fuelzone) was turned into a claim that Australia had banned small breasted women in pornography.

This attempt to turn a very serious examination of ‘teen porn’ magazines promoting sex with little girls, rape and incest into a joke, made its way around the world before you could say ‘what the…?’ Australia was sent up for having problems with ‘itty bitty boobs’ and slammed for discriminating against women with small breasts.

Crikey was first to blow the lid of the ASP charade. It seemed no one else bothered to check the ASP’s claims against reality.

What is true is that those with small or no breasts (or with breasts airbrushed out) are deliberately used in ‘teen porn’ titles to show that young girls are desperate to be penetrated by older men. But it’s not only that they are depicted as ‘flatties’ or ‘tiny’.  While unverified claims are made that the women are over 18, even if true, they are posed as children – surrounded by soft toys, holding hand puppets, wearing pig tails, braces, bobby socks, sucking lollypops etc.

Here’s an example (deliberately cropped). This is from a magazine imported by a company owned by David Watt, an office bearer with the Eros Association, which launched the ASP.

I have written about this before in this blog, in Unleashed and On Line Opinion

These images – which the sex party wants to protect so much it flicks the spin switch to overdrive -  arouse men to sexualised images of ‘children’. Where’s the media/blogger/twitterverse concern about that?  Buried under a mound of small breasts.

Julie Gale of Kids Free 2B Kids has documented the facts that stacks of these magazines are wrongly classified by the Classification Board or never go through the classification system, in a detailed submission to the Compliance and Enforcement Working Party of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General. Ironically, the October submission hasn’t been forwarded to any members of the working party, apparently because the secretariat doesn’t want to be seen to be distributing child porn.

Relates links: see Kids Free 2B Kids statement Australian Sex Party Fakes It

Underage p-on sold in corner milk bars article- The Australian April 3, 2009

Clive Hamilton has written a commendable piece about the way artistic men who commit sexual crimes are considered above the law and deserving of  special treatment. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since a piece in The Australian last week defending Roman Polanski who was just so clever and such a wonderful person and how tawdry it was that he should be subjected to the law. What I found especially troubling was the depiction of  Polanski’s assault of a girl as  ‘sexual intercourse with a minor’, with no mention of the fact that he drugged and raped her (vaginally and anally).  ‘Sexual intercourse with a minor’ disguises what really happened to the girl, who was only 13 at the time.

Creators of beauty are capable of ugliness

Clive Hamilton
Sydney Morning Herald, January 11, 2010

Also worth reading on the same issue is Gail Dines “Hollywood rape: why Polanski is getting a free ride”.

And Jenny Diski in the London Review of Books, offers thoughtful and personal commentary.

And this is a must read – Wendy Murphy takes on Whoopi Goldberg over her statement that Polanski’s behaviour wasn’t “Rape rape”.

To explore the whole issue in more depth see ‘The Gaze that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Bill Henson and Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panics’, by Dr Abigail Bray, in Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls.

The Government announced this week plans to introduce legislation for mandatory filtering of the internet at Internet Service Provider (ISP level).

This of course brought out all those who want no restrictions to the internet, arguing that the plans will mean we’ll end up living in a place like North Korea and controlled by the Taliban.

The plan is for ISPs to block blacklisted material rated Refused Classification. This is material that is already not allowed in other mediums because it is so graphic. It includes child porn, rape porn and bestiality.

The government will also provide incentives to ISPs to offer optional ISP level filtering of X and R-rated pornography.

The UN Save the Children Fund made the ridiculous claim that it would mean parents would relax about their children’s internet use. Save the Children should be welcoming anything which might lessen the multi-billion dollar trade in children’s bodies.

Any material which depicts sexual violence against women and children or which incites crimes of violence against women and children should not be allowed. Anyone justifying it should not be called a civil libertarian but a sexual assault libertarian.

For some compelling articles in favour of filtering, see:

Clive Hamilton: Web doesn’t belong to net libertarians

Abigail Bray: Googling S*x

Steven Conroy: The truth about net filtering

Let Stephen Conroy know you support the proposed legislation.

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002.

senator.conroy@aph.gov.au.