An article in today’s Mail On Sunday reveals that the high street retailer, W H Smiths has been stocking e-books with such titles as “Pregnant with Daddy” alongside childrens books. The Mail also reports that Amazon and other retailers stock similar works. Following The Mail’s investigation Smiths has removed the titles in question and apologised to it’s customers. Apparently Smiths receives an automated feed from it’s e-book supplier, Cobo with whom they are now working to ensure that titles of this nature never appear on Smith’s site again.

Books of an erotic nature should not be accessible to children and retailers should take steps to ensure that those classified as children are not able to access them. However the question as to whether we are in danger of working ourselves up into a moral panic arises. Certain fantasies such as the incest taboo are unsavoury but provided they remain purely in the realm of fantasy ought society or the state to intervene and prohibit them? For something to be prohibited should it not first be demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that the thing being banned does positive harm? In the civil service such an approach is called evidence based decision making (I.E. one weighs the evidence cooly and without bias prior to taking decisions). If one applies this way of thinking to the matter in hand books which contain incest fantasies would be prohibited if having weighed up all the available data it could be demonstrated that such works cause individuals to engage in incestuous acts.

When reading the article I couldn’t help wondering whether where Nabakov’s Lolita to have been written today would The Daily Mail be calling for it to be banned as a “dirty book”. I wonder?

Obviously we are under an obligation to protect young children from inappropriate material, however in performing this vital task we need to take care that we don’t over react by going down an authoritarian road.

For The Mail’s article please visit http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2456651/WHSmiths-vile-trade-online-rape-porn-Bookseller-apologises-sales-sick-ebooks-revealed.html