Comments on: Small victories for imbecility

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 15:14:00 +0000

The legal status of SM is still pretty dubious & it very much depends on what you’re doing, I think. Consent generally seems to be regarded as a necessary but not sufficient condition for legality. While I’m a big fan of consent (in fact i wrote an MA thesis about it) there are times where it isn’t appropriate to the scene engaged in.
Fr’instance, i know some lovely ladies in Manchester who caused a major police incident by kidnapping their friend from a public place in order to subject her to a weekend of ‘gangrape’ by hot butches. It was a fantasty of hers that they’d organised as a birthday present & she was / is thrilled, but she was never asked to consent so that makes it illegal.
Of course, the fact that consensual acts can be ruled illegal is much more worrying, but then consent is tricky business. Hard cases are always going to come down to the point where people say ‘anyone who consented to that must be crazy, and if they’re crazy then the consent doesn’t count’ eg. the German bloke who arranged to have his leg eaten. I had a long conversation with my supervisor about that while writing the thesis on consent, and i still don’t know how you’d go about regulating for those sorts of incidents (barring the clearly illegal bit of going beyond his consent by killing the guy and eating all of him).
BDSMers currently take the view that quite a bit of what they’re doing might well be illegal & try not to draw too much attention to the fact. To be honest, I think the key with these things is that the people enforcing the law (which will necessarily be general and imperfect) need to be sensible and sensitive to the communities involved, but that might need a pretty fundamental overhaul of the police force.

By: john b

john b — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 03:28:00 +0000

Matt: most technical/IT/law reporting by non-specia1ist technical/IT/law publications is appallingly shit, especially when the three specia1ist areas overlap.

Lorna: the legal status of S&M is questionable, but especially following Law Commission Consultation Paper #129 and the creation of the Human Rights Act, it is likely that the Operation Spanner case would be decided the other way if it were to come before the courts today. I'm sure Ms Longhurst is totally clueless; we'll have to wait for the government's actual legislation to see what happens...

By: Lorna

Lorna — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:56:00 +0000

I realise this is irrelevant to your wider point, but out of curiosity, do you know if they’re making a distinction between S&M and actual violence in this crusade? Since AFAIK the distinction isn’t made between S&M and assault in real life, and since the only other article I read had Ms. Longhurst admitting more-or-less ignorance about the sites, I doubt it.

By: Matt Daws

Matt Daws — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:14:00 +0000

John (or anyone else) do you have a link for your claim that it's already illegal to host such material. I ask because I was, ahem, listening to Women's Hour this morning on the radio when this very story was covered, and there was a long interview with someone from Index on Censorship and some media watchdog type. Unless I was far too busy with my work, it was not mentioned at all that this sort of material was already banded and that the efforts were to make it illegal even to access it.

That's pretty bloody poor reporting: it came across as if it was entirely legal to host the material here, and they were campaigning merely to stop this, or to somehow block European sites as well. To then criminalise people who merely search out and look at such material seems a world apart from this.

Ah, actually, The Register article seems to sum it up nicely...

By: Jim Bliss

Jim Bliss — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:20:00 +0000

To be honest I tend to forgive people like Ms. Longhurst or the parents of Leah Betts for their often misguided actions. It may sound patronising, but there's little doubt that bereavement can do weird things to people's heads.

This is why laws should never be based upon the demands of victims of crime or their families. I understand Ms. Longhurst's demands... she desperately needs to feel as though she's striking back at the man who took her daughter from her. That he's in jail isn't enough for her from a psychological standpoint, so she's started a "crusade" to channel her emotions through. It's misguided and it's probably not very healthy for her; but it's completely understandable.

Basing legislation upon her demands, however, is a fucking stupid idea.