Last week, a 20-year-old Nova Scotia man pled guilty to one count of manufacturing child pornography. In an agreed statement of facts read in court, the man acknowledged that nearly three years ago, when he was 17, he threw a small, booze-fueled party at his house with three other teenage boys and a 15-year-old girl. That night, he took a photograph of one of those boys, then 16, penetrating the girl from behind. She was naked from the waist down, and was leaning out of a window to vomit onto the ground. The 16-year-old boy was smiling into the camera, holding the girl’s hip with one hand, and giving a thumbs up with the other. The person who took the photo is awaiting sentencing. The boy in the photo is now 19, and is awaiting trial for distributing the image. The girl died last year.
In court last Monday, Nova Scotia’s Chronicle Herald reports, the “girl’s parents and their supporters” sat in the gallery wearing “T-shirts emblazoned with the girl’s name.” Across Canada, you’ll find her name printed on bumper stickers, etched into rubber bracelets, and painted on decorative rocks in memorial gardens. But you won’t find her name in the local newspaper. In the Herald, she is the “victim” in a “high-profile Nova Scotia child porn case,” the girl “who later died after attempting suicide.” On Canada.com, her name is hailed as “synonymous with a nation-wide push for better laws around bullying, revenge porn, consent and how police respond to allegations of sexual assault,” but her name itself does not appear.
Photo courtesy Leah Parsons
That’s because the judge in the case has barred Canadian journalists and everyday citizens from repeating the girl’s name in newspapers, on television, over the radio, and on social media. He cited aportion of Canadian criminal code that bans the publication of a child pornography victim’s name in connection to any legal proceeding connected to that alleged crime. After several Canadian news organizations protested the ban last April, a second judge acknowledged that the victim “has achieved quasi-celebrity status where she is known by just her first name,” and that her own parents had “expressed their most vehement disagreement with the imposition of the publication ban.” But in a May 20 decision, he shrugged that the law is the law, and that Canadian judges are compelled to follow it. (Because the case is being tried in youth court, the names of the accused are banned from publication, too.)
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