To think this is horrific? TW CSAM in a Novel

The boy in the Lawrence Sanders novel is definitely underage. In fact he's once referred to as 'infant'.

Presumably the ‘lad’ is a child? Sorry to be pedantic, it’s not clear from the extract and ‘lads’, ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ can be used by adults the same age to describe friends, and older ppl to describe younger ppl.

In relation to the novel referred to by the OP - how did this pass publication and was she arrested for inciting and promoting CSA or more for obscenity/ outraging public decency?

Weird. It was just yesterday that something triggered a memory of reading truly abhorrent stuff around 25 years ago.

I couldn't even remember the full name of the author or the book but chatgpt helped me out. This is from Lawrence Sanders' The First Deadly Sin (part 3, chapter 3). This is from the Kindle version, and I found the same in my local library.

Even at the time this was probably illegal, but certainly when this edition came out (2013) it should have been cut out. I have no idea how this was printed and reprinted, and I couldn't even find any outrage online.

TW

Well said!

I once had to suggest to the staff of a Waterstones that Lolita be taken OFF a Valentine’s themed table. (It immediately was, with profuse apologies.)

A

Im sorry, but this isn't an art or free speech issue.

I wholeheartedly agree that any topic can be written about, but the genre in which it is written and how it is written DOES matter.

CSA in a novel as part of wider context to a character, sure.
CSA in an erotica novel, written in a way to arouse a certain demographic.... How can we not take issue?

I believe the intent matters, and being an erotica author writing those lines it is pretty clear.

I don't think PP have actually read the actual quotes before commenting here.

Childhood sexual abuse, the overpowering and disempowering of a child through sexual means.

Why would anyone want to write about this in a fictional style and more importantly what sort of person would want to read it.

It is the most gruesome taboo.
I am aware that it is not illegal and of that I can do nothing but I can voice my utter disgust at this being considered as an 'art' form or indeed any form of entertainment.

Human produced fiction (and 'art' of all kinds) has always been something of a morally controversial area - can things that are abhorrent be justified on the grounds that they are 'art'? However, the 'art' justification can't be applied to AI generated material, so there isn't the same grey area.

It's a very interesting ethical issue. Do we ban art (in it's widest sense) if it offends is? If it describes an illegal act?

What about all the novels and films with depictions of horrendous murders?

I certainly wouldn't want to read any descriptions of CSA, fictional or otherwise, but do I want to ban fiction? I really don't want to go down that road.

Laws are in the process of being passed to make AI generated abuse material illegal in the UK.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8d90qe4nylo

That is helpful to know. I actually googled some things around the law - a man was jailed for creating images using AI but it seemed to involve real people in manipulated images. I am glad that is illegal.

That seems different to writing a fictional account of something, though.

The thing about AI is that its knowledge is entirely drawn from what it scrapes from the internet - whatever people might claim about generative AI, it isn't capable of original thought. So any human images it produces are drawn from actual people somewhere.

I honestly don’t know where I draw the line. AI was not something I accounted for when i formulated my moral code, and I feel very strange about that. I would probably say AI IMO falls under fiction. It isn’t real, there is no victim. (I am not actually sure of the law on this in the UK currently!).

Where do YOU draw the line with fiction books? Should writing a graphic murder scene be illegal too?

Should I be able to write a detailed description of how to make an explosive device and smuggle it onto a train, plane or ocean liner? What if I used my inside knowledge of a concert hall to describe precisely how to carry out a massacre? I wouldn’t do it, I’d just write a fictional story.

Then where do you draw the line? Is it ok to use AI to create images because it's fictional? If this was a man people would be screaming to have his hard drives searched. There is something wrong with you if you write sexually explicit scenes of paedophilia that you sell as romantic erotica.

Abhorrent, yes, but is it illegal? I don’t think it should be.

Fictionalised CSA is abhorrent.
There is no defence.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

As a PP noted, the writer in question is probably not on par with Nabokov. But the quality of the prose shouldn't be the reason to arrest or not arrest a writer. Are all potentially distressing subjects to be banned? That is a slope of the slipperiest variety.

I saw some people talking about this on TikTok the other day and thought I couldn’t be that bad but that is fucking gross.

I think it's horrific that a writer was arrested for writing fiction.

"My juicy lucy, perfect at three years old." "I got so excited I wet my pants, at night I used my unicorn stuffy and thought of my Dads best friend and wished he could be my Daddy"

Those are direct quotes from the books.

There are ways of writing about abuse, even sexual abuse, that are not salacious or puerile. You can explore the subject without writing porn. There shouldn’t be banned subjects, but there’s justification for obscenity laws. Of course, there’s a whole other dimension of what constitutes obscenity.

I see what you are saying, but if someone is looking to 'get off' on abuse stories, they could pluck almost any misery memoir off the shelf to get their fix.

If content breaches obscenity laws in the country in which it's published, it shouldn't make a difference whether it has a black cover with red glittery writing; a sepia-tinted photo of a ragged child overlaid by a graffiti-esque typeface; or the Penguin Classics insignia on the spine.

Agree that that makes it 1000x more grim (and I doubt her writing is on a par with Nabokov) but I’m not convinced it makes it more illegal, does it?