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Greaves wrote a book entitled, "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct." The book taught potential and practicing pedophiles how to have sex with children and rape them. Greaves was arrested this week in Colorado and will be extradited to Florida.
"You cannot engage or depict children in a harmful relationship," said Polk County, Florida, Sheriff Grady Judd. Judd was explaining an obscenity statute in Florida which precludes individuals or groups from distributing obscene materials depicting minors in harmful situations.
Greaves was arrested in Pueblo, Colorado this week after Florida authorities received a copy of his book in the mail. He will face charges in the state of Florida for publishing the book. The book was published on Amazon.com, which faced a significant backlash and threats of a boycott for refusing to take the book off the website. They eventually gave in and took the book down after experiencing significant public pressure.
According to Judd, the book contain examples of molestation involving boys that were 9 and 13-years old. Florida is the only state that can prosecute Greaves for writing this book, since it is the only state that goes beyond freedom of speech laws in its prosecution.
After the initial publicity of Phillip Greaves' book, sales shot through the roof. The book went from number 158,221 on the Amazon.com best-seller list to number 146 in just one day. The book brings up questions regarding just how far our country should go when it comes to protecting our citizens from being exposed to harmful or dangerous speech. It also reminds parents of the fact that there are quite a few adults in the world who have an interest in this kind of deplorable behavior.
Freedom of Speech is introduced in Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights, which states that: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Commonly-accepted limitations on freedom of speech is language that is deemed to be harmful or pornographic. It appears that Greaves' book may fall under both categories. It is puzzling to some, however, why the book was not illegal in states other than Florida. Greaves says this about his book:
"This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian rules for these adults to follow. I hope to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter sentences should they ever be caught."
One of the freedoms granted in the age of the Internet is the ability to self-publish books. Anyone with a sales-worthy idea and a marketing plan can push a book without anyone's permission. At the same time, there is the challenge that books may be released without sufficient quality control, as appears to have been the case for Mr. Greaves. I'm sure that no publisher would have allowed such a book to be written, and his ideas would have been filtered long before his arrest.
This book is also difficult to accept in a world where far too many children are victimized by those attempting to have sex with them. There are the cases of young boys being raped by men, but also the far more frequent instances of the 13-year old girl getting impregnated by the 29-year old man (you may know one in your neighborhood). While some would argue that the first case is more serious than the latter, the fact is that pedophilia continues to be one of the untold secrets of the black community.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.