LONDON, ENGLAND – In response to what government officials term “considerable public concern about the availability of extreme pornographic material featuring adults,” the British government plans to criminalize the possession (including downloading from the internet) of “extreme pornographic material.”In the foreword of the Consultation: On the possession of extreme pornographic material, authors Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Paul Goggins, (MP), and Scottish Executive Minister for Justice, Cathy Jamieson, (MSP), lay out a case for the law’s necessity.
The authors equate their effort to combat “extreme” porn with the fight against child porn, and specify that by “extreme” porn they “are not referring to what might be called mainstream pornography,” but content which is “violent and abusive, featuring activities which are illegal in themselves and where, in some cases, participants may have been the victims of criminal offenses.”
The Consultation also notes that it is already illegal to publish such material under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982, and point that the global nature of the internet makes it “very difficult to prosecute those responsible who are mostly operating from abroad.”
Critics of the proposed ban argue that it will be difficult to enforce due to a wide range of technical challenges, and that the demands it will place on law enforcement resources will render such enforcement impractical.
“To legislate for a digital black pencil may satisfy immediate demands for action,” David Rowan writes in his analysis for The Times Online. “But where the internet is concerned, legally enforceable bans rarely achieve their goal. Just ask the next eBay fraudster or penis-extension spammer who contacts you.”
Some civil liberties groups and digital rights activists question not only the proposed ban’s validity, but the potential efficacy, as well. “The idea that you can prevent violent action by banning such images is nonsense,” said Chris Evans of Internet Freedom, adding that internet users “should be able to make up their own minds about what they view.”
As with many laws regarding the issue of “obscenity,” the new UK law suffers from language that is ill-defined, leading to concerns about over-broadness, and blurring the lines between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” content.
While the “Content of material” section of the Consultation does specify that the restricted depictions would be those that include “intercourse or oral sex with an animal” and “ii) sexual interference with a human corpse,” it also includes the far more obscure “serious violence in a sexual context” and “serious sexual violence.” The very definition of “serious violence” in the Consultation acknowledges the difficulty of distinguishing real violence from staged violence, stating that a depiction will be considered to contain “serious violence” where depictions “involve or will appear to involve serious bodily harm in a context or setting which is sexual.”
“The authors tie themselves in knots over what will be allowed and what won’t be,” notes Brendan O’Neill in his spiked-online.com commentary. “So it will still be okay to possess images of ‘milder forms of bondage and humiliation, which are common place in pornographic material,’ so long as you don’t cross the line into imagery that ‘depicts suffering, pain, torture and degradation of a kind which we believe most people would find abhorrent.’ Who will decide when that line has been crossed?”
Supporters of the ban point to what they consider overwhelming public concern. “This is material which is extremely offensive to the vast majority of people, and it should have no place in our society,” said Home Office Minister Paul Goggins.
Critics, however, claim the new law is not so much a response to a groundswell of public concern, but a “kneejerk” reaction to a specific, grisly murder. “It is always unwise to legislate in response to a single emotive crime,” Rowan asserted in his commentary, “and the current government consultation owes rather too much momentum to the brutal murder of Jane Longhurst.”
Goggins and many other supporters of the ban do frequently cite the Longhurst case, in which the young teacher from Sussex was strangled by a man apparently obsessed with violent pornography. Her killer, Graham Coutts, was a regular visitor to violent pornographic websites, and who spent about 90 minutes of the day before the murder downloading images of necrophilia and asphyxial sex.
“These websites certainly appealed to Coutts’s disturbingly violent sexuality,” Rowan conceded. “But does that really justify the conclusion, as voiced by David Lepper, Jane Longhurst’s MP, that the internet ‘doubtless led to Jane’s death’? It is an assumption that needs to be thoroughly tested before a neutral communications channel is blamed for inciting, rather than reflecting, one of the darkest aspects of human nature.”
Under the new law, simply viewing “extreme” material would constitute possession, although the government said it did not intend to prosecute people who “accidentally stumbled” across the images. Those convicted would face up to three years in prison.
According to the Home Office, the legislation would be the first of its kind for any Western nation.
