Source : Perth Now news
Police have investigated after some handmade paper hedgehogs given to children were made using pages from an erotic novel.
Some parents were “horrified” after realising the unique items – which were given by a made who made the hedgehogs from donated books as a charity fundraiser – contained explicit passages from Nicholson Baker’s 1994 book The Fermata.
One mother, Linda Fortune, told The Guardian newspaper that her four-year-old granddaughter had one of the hedgehogs, but the pages used contained “adult content” and “pure sexual stuff”.
Several other families contacted her after she shared her experience on social media, and they had the same complaint.
Another woman, Jemma Ashby, took one of the handmade hedgehogs for her 10-year-old daughter after being approached by a man at the supermarket.
After seeing Fortune’s post, Ashby told the Wirral Globe how she “ran upstairs and grabbed” the hedgehog to see if it was appropriate.
She added: “I grabbed a middle page and it said something about being a legal age, and then another page saying about someone’s sister being murdered.
“I took it out of her room straight away and hid it.”
However, another parent commented on the Wirral Globe’s Facebook page to say they had one of the items, and there was “nothing inappropriate in it”.
Merseyside Police spoke to the man responsible after concerned parents reported the situation.
According to the authorities, officers were “happy there was no malice involved and no offences have been committed”.
The spokesperson said: “The hedgehogs were created in good faith by the individual and have been used to raise money for a local charity.”
They added that the man behind the hedgehogs usually checked the pages before he used them for the craftwork.
