Letter from Leeds
A Penalty for Your Thoughts
[David Wall is Professor of Criminology at the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom. He teaches cybercrime. He wrote the foreword to a groundbreaking book exploring the twilight zone between disturbing sexual thought and criminal behavior. The book is “The Criminalisation of Fantasy Material: Law and Sexually Explicit Representations of Fictional Children,” and as you can see the title alone is enough to set some people’s hair on fire. Its author, lawyer Hadeel Al-Alosi, is Lecturer at the School of Law at Australia’s Western Sydney University, and her research spans the law, criminology, and psychology. She has kindly given permission to reprint Dr. Wall’s foreword, with minor edits, here.]
This book addresses one of the most sensitive issues in cyberlaw/cybercrime studies — the determination as to where the tipping point lies between thought and actions, especially with regard to cultural artefacts and law. It not only discusses and outlines the important role of law in defining and redefining the borderline between the two, but it also painstakingly outlines the issues relating to Fantasy Crime with regard to ambivalent sexual imagery in the Manga/Anime genre which lies on the borders of debates over child sexual materials and freedom of expression. As such, the book enters into a useful critical debate about Fantasy Crime materials; the debate over their potential harms to society and also the ways that they can be regulated.
What I found refreshing about this book is that it did not just wade into legal debates over harmful child sexual materials, rather it considered the issues within a much broader interdisciplinary context than is normally covered in such discussions. I felt that the issues are discussed well and at an appropriate depth. In so doing, the author raises a number of important provocative questions, whilst managing to avoid the potential minefield created by the politically charged moral debates found in different jurisdictions. Furthermore, it also captures many of the dilemmas experienced by the practitioner community in policing and regulating Fantasy materials.
Whether or not you agree with the views put forward in this book, it remains an important contribution to knowledge, particularly — as mentioned earlier — the critical, broad and interdisciplinary approach taken towards the issue.
[Dr. Al-Alosi spent four years examining the possible theoretical justifications for and against the enactment of laws that criminalize wholly fictional child pornography. She focused on the legal systems of her own country, as well as Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In her own introduction, she challenges readers “to consider the impact of the law on individual freedoms and whether fictional child pornography should be suppressed on the grounds of its perceived harms.” At the same time, she urges readers to reject the idea that, “since fictional child pornography does not involve direct physical harm to children, it must be harmless.”
Dr. Al-Alosi’s book is available here, and if you use the promo code FLR40 you’ll save twenty percent on the price. You can also get it at Amazon.]