fascism is fascism is fascism
An Australian fiction author was arrested over a book she wrote recently (read more here). The police said they did this “following reports of a fiction novel containing child abuse material”.
I haven't read the book, nor do I know anything about the author or what she's written beyond vague social media references. Readers are allowed to feel how they want about it, they're allowed to DNF it and give it bomb reviews, they're allowed to boycott the author.
But she's been arrested. She could go to jail for writing fiction. This is terrifying and it should be terrifying to everyone.
You know what books get banned if we ban CSA in books? The Colour Purple. Beloved. Lolita. Any memoirs from CSA victims.
And I know there'll be some internet warrior out there ready to tell me all the nuances and differences between these books and the arrested author's book: that her book sexualised this dynamic, it was romanticised, it was for erotic purposes, it was disgusting and triggering. You know what? Yeah. From what little I've seen, I agree. There's no comparison to be made between 'Daddy's Little Toy' and 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'. But this isn't about that; it's about the law, which eventually won't distinguish between them if the vague definition of CSAM is allowed to encapsulate fiction.
You can't make fiction illegal based on your own personal distaste for certain subjects, even if they're presented in a simplistic or sexualised or problematic way. Conservatives have been open about their beliefs that drag storytimes are child abuse, that exposing children to any form of queerness is child abuse. What if CSAM expands to include that? Do we arrest every author who's written queer young adult fiction?
The truth is, our heads are on the chopping block next. They will come for you. You can't be a little bit fascist and expect it to stop there. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou have all been banned before, which is why I used their work as examples. Black women will be first on the chopping block, right alongside trans writers.
If you support criminalising authors, but think it should be solely contained to what you find offensive and dangerous, you are doing exactly what fascism wants you to.
I'm terrified. I'm terrified that I'm seeing hordes of young, left-leaning people celebrating this across social media, to see people who love books celebrating this, to see anyone saying that is a bad thing being shut down and labelled a predator and paedophile.
This author was arrested in Australia; in the US, Trump is defunding the Department of Education and supporting mass book bans to protect children from "woke" ideology; in the UK, puberty blockers have been banned on the grounds of "protecting children". All of these things are interconnected. In our English-speaking Western world, trends catch on fast. The guise of "protecting children" has always been used as a cover for fascism.
And the irony is, children aren't being protected. As someone who's worked in child safety, I know the things we need to do to ensure children are protected from sexual abuse - and those are social security, teaching body safety from a young age, and supporting parents to watch out for the warning signs. We need to particularly support communities of colour, particularly Black and Indigenous communities, and poor communities.
But of course, we defund education and healthcare and benefits instead, we blame parents, we hush up institutional abuse. We continue bombing Palestinian children with those tax dollars instead. We continue our White supremacist hurricane.
Governments don't actually give a fuck about protecting children. If they did, they'd help the children actually being harmed. But instead, they'll ban books and arrest authors to distract you, to make you focussed on the wrong issues. And this is a two for one deal, because when they decide that you are the problem, they can use your own logic against you, because they planted it there in the first place.
