British Columbia Supreme Court Rules Writings About Sexual Acts With Children Have Artistic Merit and Are Legal
B.C. court decision a disappointment: child advocates
By CBC News Online staff
Originally published at CBC News Online, March 27, 2002
VANCOUVER — Child advocates and sexual abuse investigators say the B.C. Supreme Court's decision to make sexually explicit stories about children legal will only encourage sexual predators. Judge Duncan Shaw ruled Tuesday that John Robin Sharpe's writings about sexual acts with children have artistic merit and are legal.
Sharpe has refused to paraphrase the content of his stories, entitled "Boyabuse," "Timothy and the Terrorist," and "Stand by America." He has spent the last seven years defending his right to author them.
"Look, read the decision. The decision contains descriptions of the stories," said Sharpe. The stories contain graphic descriptions of adults torturing or having sex with children.
Vancouver police detective Noreen Waters has read Sharpe's stories, and says she thinks they go too far. "I think if anybody in the community read that material they'd be appalled, absolutely appalled," she says. Waters says this type of literature sexually excites pedophiles and is often possessed by child abusers. Child advocates have also expressed concern about the writings, which they say romanticizes violent acts against children.
Anabell Webb, spokesperson for the advocacy group Justice for Girls, says the ruling does ignore the rights of children and encourages sexual abuse. "When you have material that portrays children as enjoying sexual abuse and torture done to them, at the very least we're romanticizing and normalizingthat type of abuse done to children," said Webb.
But B.C. Civil Liberties Association president John Dixon says Canadians must have the freedom to write, draw or imagine anything they want.
"These works of fiction, however disgusting and morally repugnant, are not advocacy and counselling and they have the characteristics and form of art," says Dixon. "We're talking about materials that are tantamount to mere thought or imagination," he says. "We ought to be very careful not to move into the area of thought control and impose a sort of orthodoxy of sexual imagination on people."
