...if LJ/6A decides that it is somehow objectionable.

I've been watching all the fallout from the Warriors for Innocence crap, and deciding how to respond. I'm not a fanfic writer or reader, and I'm not in fandom at all. Truth be told, I don't get the whole thing. But I have friends who are active in fandom, and seem to get a lot from it, and that in an of itself makes this whole thing my concern.

Do I find a lot of the stuff in fandom, including that written by my friends, disturbing? Yes. I don't particularly want to open up my Friends page and read Twincest or Snarry or any of it. But my friends are good enough to employ the LJ cut, and I can choose not to read that material. I don't go to communities whose main job is fanfic porn, because I can choose not to read that material. The same way I don't go to Conservative Christian blogs, Republican blogs, or communities and LJs that deal with stuff I find troubling/disturbing/boring/stupid/irrelevant/etc.

And this whole thing matters to me because, as most of you who know me IRL know, I'm an abuse survivor myself. And the pedophile who targetted me didn't come through the Internet. He didn't find me outside my elementary school. He didn't even sneak in my bedroom window. 

He was in my family. He lived with my grandmother. He was my mother's father.

The same way that most people who victimize children do, he chose those closest to him. Warriors for Innocence or any vigilante group could not have prevented what happened to me, to my sisters, to my cousins.

Until we address, as a culture, why people abuse the children closest to them, we'll never put this issue to rest.

And when we make it unsafe for survivors to talk about their experiences in a forum such as LJ, we negate their -- dare I say, my -- experience, somehow say "That's nice honey, now don't talk about it, just get over it, and it will be OK." 

The cost of free speech is that sometimes people say things we don't like. I am an extreme protector of free speech, as threerings would say. I will defend to my death the right of someone to say something I abhor. I also agree that pictures of children (or anyone) being victimized are a different thing than prose or other writing, as it is necessary for an illegal act to be committed in order for that picture to exist. Does it bother me that people write about finding little kids sexy? Well, hell yes. It bothers me to read blogs where military personnel talk about the carnage in Iraq too. And yes, there is a part of me that would love to see any parent who admitted online to raping their kid, put away for the rest of his or her life. (However, unlike WfI, I don't applaud the new death penalty for pedophiles...) 

It's hard for me to defend the right of pedophiles to free speech, especially when I know that someone speaking up would have prevented my own childhood trauma. Part of me is physically sick about it. I've gone around about this in my head for the last 24 hours. The thing I keep coming back to is, we cannot police the Net and police speech in this way. I can respect a company setting up its TOS to exclude certain things from the outset, but to create a forum for free speech and then retroactively change the rules, and then capriciously delete accounts without fully investigating what was going on there, or even notifying the users, is a complete violation of everything blogging and the net stands for. To do so in response to a vigilante group is even more so. When facsist tactics are rewarded, we'll only see more of it. (Reference the last 7 years in our country, people.)

And the other thing I keep coming back to is, when will my interests be deeemed "offensive" by LJ/6A or some vigilante of the Net? When do they decide that anyplace that harbors bisexual Pagans must be a den of iniquity? When will the morning come that I wake up and find my journal gone? If I talk about being an abuse survivor, does that make my journal offensive? What about if I talk about the interviews with abuse survivors I did in my dissertation research? If I read Lolita for 50bookchallenge, does that make me a child rapist? Where does it stop?

This journal has been a powerful tool for me, and to feel like I have to censor myself in the place I come to be totally free, feels.....well, abusive.