In this rather astonishing story an Australian female author was charged with child pornography for having written a fictional novel about an 18-year old woman’s relationship with a man who has fantasized about her since she was a toddler. The defendant has pleaded not guilty to possessing, disseminating, and producing child abuse material. The case is on-going, but a conviction here would have serious implications for writers and artists – for anyone really. Here, censorship is now extending to purely verbal materials that do not describe any actual sex with a child, but merely a man’s fantasies. Thus, for writing a fiction within a fiction about youth sexuality, this author has received criminal charges and multiple death threats. Is this the direction that some societies are moving in terms of censorship and sexuality? Will it eventually be illegal to think certain sexual thoughts or to portray certain sexual fictional thoughts? We will keep an eye out for this case’s resolution for sure.
A slippery slope for sex and censorship
