There is a strong and depressing tendency in our society not only for nannying cretins to fuck about with things that are absolutely none of their business, but also for The Powers That Be to pay attention to them.
As an example, I give you Ofcom’s TV adjudications. If you’re sufficiently excised about Bob Geldof saying ‘fuck’ during Live 8 to write a letter of complaint, you’re an idiot. What the hell justification might you have for doing such a thing? The same goes for whoever complained about Celebrity Love Island contestants saying ‘shit’, although perhaps complaining about Celebrity Love Island’s very existence might be justifiable.
However, the main example motivating this post is far less hilarious and more insidious: ladies and gentlemen, I give you Liz Longhurst. Now, Ms Longhurst’s daughter got raped, murdered and raped by a vile bastard who’s now rotting in jail where he eminently belongs. This undeniably sucked a lot, for both of the Ms Longhursts. However, any sympathies that a reasonable person might have had for the elder Ms Longhurst have been thorougly annihilated by her crazed one-woman crusade to ban the shadier types of porn.
She claims her crusade is because the bastard who killed her daughter was driven to do so by online rape and necrophiliac pornography (this isn’t actually true – he admitted to a friend back in the 1980s that he was planning to kill someone, long before Internet porn went beyond ASCII. It’s odd that someone could be so terribly misinformed about their own daughter’s murder, but there you go…).
As a result of this strange misconception, she’s attempting to make the UK ban necrophiliac and rape porn. Well, not just *ban* it – it’s already illegal to sell or host on a UK website under the Obscene Publications Act – but also apply the same rules that currently apply to child pornography, so that people who merely *download* the relevant pixels from foreign websites will be eligible for tracking, arrest, public humiliation, prosecution, losing their jobs and friends, having their house burned down by deranged mobs, suicide, etc.
Why? Well, there’s no actual *evidence* that criminalising people who view violent porn will reduce levels of sexual violence, any more than there’s evidence that criminalising people who view child pornography has reduced levels of child abuse. However, if you oppose such rules then you’re clearly A Rapist And A Necrophile And A Paedo Yourself, Otherwise Why Would You Stick Up For Them? (it’s also called the ‘if you stick up for the smelly kid with no mates then everyone will hate you as well’ argument, reflecting its sophistication and maturity).
Because our government has approximately the backbone of an unusually invertebrate (even by the standards of that species) jellyfish, Ms Longhurst’s crusade appears to have succeeded: the government has hinted that it plans to introduce laws against accessing violent pornography, despite the fact that this is a restriction on free speech with no demonstrable benefits whatsoever. Yay.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.