UK Court Blocks Author From Publishing A Book About His Own Sexual Abuse, At Ex-Wife's Request

Free Speech

from the bwah!?!? dept

There’s no doubt that even closely related or allied countries treat the issue of free speech quite differently. Perhaps our most natural European cultural equivalent, Britain, has laws that I often find either confusing or silly, with a particular eye towards their long-panned libel laws. But even correcting for cultural differences, I’m having a real hard time figuring out how a UK court can issue an injunction barring the publishing of an author’s recounting of his own personal history with sexual abuse at his ex-wife’s request. You’ll have to forgive the vagueness here, because there are simply no names being discussed on the matter due to the ongoing litigation.

A British performing artist has been forced to shelve a book based on his experiences of childhood sexual abuse after his ex-wife obtained an injunction to prevent their young son from reading it. In a case that is alarming freedom of speech campaigners and which publishers say is deeply disturbing, the court of appeal has ordered that the artist cannot publish key sections of the book until the issue has been decided at trial.

However, his ex-wife’s lawyers dispute claims that the case could set a precedent undermining the rights of other authors, arguing that it is concerned only with the rights of one child, who has a number of health problems, who they say would suffer catastrophic psychological distress were he to read parts of his father’s work.

Let me flesh this out for you a bit. A well-known artist in the UK is publishing a memoir, including sections that deal with the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. His ex-wife obtained the injunction on publishing that factual account of his life because she believes it will harm, by her lawyer’s own admission, a single child the two had together. That child is suffering a wide range of health problems, including Asperger’s Syndrome, and the ex-wife is suggesting that reading the father’s account would cause further harm. All of this, by the way, relies on a Victorian-era case the dealt with the intentional psychological harm some guy perpetrated on a woman in a bar by playing a practical joke on her. Seriously, I’m not making that crap up.

To be clear, the injunction is temporary, but the alarming part is that the court seems to be staying the publication in order to ask an incomplete question.

While accepting that there was a public interest in the book being published, the court granted a temporary injunction and ruled that the question of whether the boy’s rights should take priority over those of his father should be decided at a full trial.

The problem here is that the court shouldn’t be tossing that public interest out so easily. Imagine, if you will, a court system that disallows factual information to be revealed simply because someone may find it unpleasant. In this particular case, we have a child with medical issues to consider, a potentially sympathetic “victim”, but it need not be so, based on the law if this case sets the wrong precedent. You might simply see young children used as excuses to keep controversial information from ever seeing the light of day.

Add on top of that the concept of keeping a victim of sexual abuse from being able to do as he pleases with that information and we’re suddenly diving into the arena in which the government is abusing him all over again. Not overtly, of course, but if intimidating homosexuals into staying in the closet is abuse, and it is, the same should be said of abuse-victims being prevented from telling their factual stories. Above and beyond all that, the parents could have tried to reach an agreement to simply not allow their child to read the book until a certain age.

Instead, the mysterious ex-wife is robbing the public of a piece of literature in order to protect her son from being parented. Hey, my UK peeps: either you have free speech or you don’t. I know you don’t have our Constitution, but if the status of speech is such that you can’t write about your own lives, you may have a problem.

Filed Under: book, free speech, injunction, publishing, uk