Recently, Amazon.com made available for purchase through their site a book for pedophiles that supported the sexual abuse of children. The public's outrage was quickly expressed and Amazon finally relented in eliminating the book from its selection list. Here is a letter sent to Amazon by Prevent Child Abuse America, urging the nation's largest online bookseller to take this action and explaining why. Prevent Child Abuse America is a partner of the Enough Abuse Campaign.
posted by Jetta Bernier, Executive Director, Massachusetts Citizens for Children
Mr. Jeffrey Bezos
Founder, Chairman and CEO
Amazon.com
1200 12th Ave, Suite 1200
Seattle, WA 98144
Dear Mr. Bezos,
I am writing today on behalf of the Board and staff of Prevent Child Abuse America (www.preventchildabuse.org), our 47 state chapters and our Healthy Families America network to express our deep and profound concern that the book "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct" was recently made available on Amazon.com.
Our ability to grow and succeed as a country depends on how well we foster the health and well-being of our children. Healthy child development is the foundation of community development and our country’s overall, long term economic development.
This type of book, while obviously deplorable for its content, is more than just a disturbing piece of propaganda. It promotes the normalization of something that is destructive to children and something that negates the important investments we make in the healthy development of our children. The people who will act upon this book’s content, and the effect of their actions, can lead to significant issues in a wide array of areas including crime, substance abuse, mental health, lost productivity and even our competitiveness in the global economy. As Mission Readiness: Military Leaders for Kids (www.missionreadiness.org) has declared, denying children a healthy childhood can even compromise our national security because it impedes our ability to mobilize a stable, healthy and qualified military for generations to come.
While we appreciate your subsequent removal of the book from the site; the fact that it was even available through Amazon.com indicates an inconsistency in how the corporation approaches standards and guidelines. Many comments are restricted and filtered, but content such as this book was made available. We need to understand what corporate processes are in place to determine what is to be advertised and sold on Amazon.com and how could a culture even exist in the organization that does not continuously and without fail, ensure that all actions and products first do no harm to our nation’s children?
We would be happy to support you in creating criteria and strengthening the controls that should prohibit this type of decision from ever happening again.
Please have someone in your corporation contact me so we may work together to prevent the abuse and neglect of our nation’s children. My direct telephone number is (312) 663-3520, extension 810.
Sincerely,
James M. Hmurovich, President & CEO
Prevent Child Abuse America
