“This pervert lives in the building.” This message accompanied a photo of Robin Sharpe that was put up in his Vancouver apartment complex after he was charged with possession of child pornography. The first chapter of Stan Persky and John Dixon’s incisive work details how the charges and resulting media attention transformed Sharpe, a retired urban planner and a divorced father of two, into a social pariah. With the help of previously unreleased documents, On Kiddie Porn then dispassionately describes the drafting and passage of the 1993 law that condemned Sharpe for possessing written material describing sexual activities with children and photos of two naked teens, and follows his constitutional challenge up to its disposition by the Supreme Court in January 2001.

The authors deftly position the struggle to prohibit the possession of child pornography within the broader context of the so-called porn wars, seeing it as another joint project of that curious, uneasy alliance between cultural conservatives and anti-porn feminists.

In the right place at the right time – or so it seemed – Kim Campbell (then minister of justice) sensed an opportunity to knit together skirmishing factions of Mulroney’s polarized party by sponsoring sweeping child pornography legislation. Like a legal Paddle to the Sea, the book follows this little canoe to the ocean, watching as the resulting prohibition is struck down by two lower courts, and then, finally, largely upheld by the highest court in the land.

The civil libertarian authors argue persuasively that the Supreme Court has allowed Parliament to overreach itself and that we in our complacency have accepted the lie that antisocial behaviour can be deterred through censorship. The government should only have criminalized possession of visual porn made using actual children, Persky and Dixon maintain, rather than also targeting the written products of twisted imaginations. The book adeptly describes this particular statute’s swift birth and the twists and turns of Sharpe’s case, all the while shedding light on matters of more general interest – the realpolitik of lawmaking and the strange, unpredictable world of Charter litigation.