Manga, obscenity, criminality

[starlady]

One future planned Mechademia theme is actually "criminalities." I expect we'll get a lot of articles about shôjo (because girlhood in a male-oriented society is a crime), but maybe we'll get some essays tackling the recent trial of Christopher Handley, manga collector, in Iowa. To recap: in 2006, U.S. Customs opened one of Handley's packages from Japan and found a lolicon volume (I'm personally still not sure which one) depicting, well, explicit lolicon, which is child sexual abuse from a certain perspective. The D.A. went after Handley, and he pled guilty in a plea bargain about two weeks ago.

I should make it clear that there is absolutely no allowance to be made for people who actually sexually abuse children, but there's a very wide gap between Handley and actual sex criminals. Handley pleading guilty sets a very dangerous precedent that could very well be used to further roll back First Amendment protections in this country--while we pride ourselves in principle on our First Amendment rights, we are actually less free in our speech than many other countries, and this case is one more example of that. Personally I find the equation of possession of lolicon manga with "obscenity" or with an actual crime of some kind to be very, very suspect and equally perilous. The concept of obscenity itself seems to me to be a convenient euphemism for "speech those in power don't like." And if anyone is going to have free speech in actuality, everyone needs to have free speech in reality, and that goes double for unpopular speech.

I actually know one of the people who was retained by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund as a manga expert on Handley's behalf; Wired quotes her very briefly in its short piece on the case. If nothing else, this case should make it clear that the context of manga in America is vastly different from its native context in Japan: in the specific case of lolicon, for instance, Japan very much embraces a strict divide between the consumption of images depicting illegal acts and the commission of illegal acts themselves that America has never really embraced. Anecdotally, people will insist that the Japanese approach allows people to fulfill their fantasies without actually crossing the line into actual violence, and from what I know crime statistics certainly present a compelling argument for this idea (although I also know that crime in Japan is woefully under-reported, under-investigated, and under-prosecuted from an American perspective). But America (and this may have something to do with Christian approaches to sin) is quite different, and though manga may travel across borders, societal attitudes are much less fungible.

Apparently the D.A. is planning to throw the book at Handley; he faces up to 15 years in prison, up to $250,000 in fines, three years' probation, and will spend the rest of his life on a sex offender registry, all without ever having actually committed a crime other than buying a dirty comic book. Handley clearly ought to petition the judge to assign him different counsel, since even from the other side of the country I can tell that his lawyers are unsophisticated idiot hacks: this case is being used to make the D.A.'s name, and now that he has a guilty plea, he has no incentive to go easy on Handley. I also very much want to know just what it was that made Customs decide to open Handley's mail.

In conclusion, I urge people to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in any way they can. Since this was such an easy win for the D.A., I very much doubt that this will be the last such case.

Comments

[aquaeri]

"Speech those in power don't like" has to be the definition of the kind of speech 'free speech' is meant to protect.

[starlady]

Exactly--but it's also the sort of speech that is most often challenged.

[outou.livejournal.com]

It's all too easy to just call Handley a pedophile and dismiss him to whatever fate the courts give him. Granted, I've always found lolicon disgusting, but this seems too...it seems too close to arresting those who appear to have the potential of committing a crime. Attempting to halt illegal activities in such a way will likely lead only to unjust profiling--and the arrest of entirely innocent people.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. Personally, I can't stand lolicon (or shota for that matter), but the only thing he did was buy a comic book, and because it depicts, essentially, pedophilia, that makes him a pedophile? It just doesn't make sense, and if the images in question weren't pedophilic (if, say, they depicted murder or rape), not only would he not be treated as a murderer or a rapist, no one would question his right to consume such images. Other people have tossed the phrase "thought crime" around in commenting on this case, and it's scarily accurate imo.