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Originally Posted by chilady1
I guess for some folks, if it has never happened to them or know of a child this has happened to, the empathy doesn't exist.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chilady1
this book NEVER should have been available on Amazon. It sickens me to read some of the comments on this board.
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I think I weighed in on this in the other thread, but here it is, with fuller disclosure. I am a survivor of a violent childhood sexual assault, committed against me at knifepoint when I was not quite 13. I volunteered as a rape crisis and child abuse prevention advocate for about 7 years, and was my agency's volunteer of the year one year. I now work as a paralegal, and one of my specialties is juvenile dependency law - that is, the law concerning children who are in foster care. In my professional life, I've seen and heard things far more horrifying than anything in that book. I've seen crime scene photos, read autopsy reports, watched videotaped interviews with abused and neglected children.
That said, although I think it ought to be immediately obvious to everyone that I find the content of this guy's book abhorrent, I nonetheless would absolutely defend his right to publish it. In the
marketplace of ideas, the answer to hateful or abhorrent ideas isn't to ban the offending speech. Discuss the issues, sure. Raise countervailing arguments, absolutely. Counter "bad speech" with "good speech", you bet. But banning the "bad speech" is inimical to a free society, because once you draw the "bad speech" line where YOU want it, you're vulnerable to other people moving that line to where THEY want it.
And, for the record, I'd feel the same way even if the man who raped me had been READING this guy's book at the time. Because the reality is, the idea that pedophilia is okay is already widely expressed in places far beyond this book (in other books, message boards, chat rooms for pedophiles, etc.) That's the problem with ideas - once they're out of the bottle, you can't stuff them back in. Banning this book does nothing to eradicate the idea that pedophilia is okay, because eradicating an idea is impossible.
All you can do by banning a book with which you strongly disagree is make it okay for other people to ban other books with which they disagree. And banning this book doesn't make children one whit safer. Pedophiles existed, and abused children, long before this book existed, and they'll be around long after this book fades from the news.
If you want to truly help the vulnerable, don't waste your air advocating to ban this book. Go volunteer with your local rape crisis center. Make quilts for kids in the foster care system. Or write a book shining a light on the real problem of sexual abuse of children, like
this person did.