Despite eloquent opposition from a wide variety of sources including, surprisingly, a number of right-wing newspapers not normally associated with liberal views on kinky sex, the British Government is introducing a bill during the current session of Parliament to outlaw extreme BDSM imagery.
As Fetish Dayz readers who saw my earlier piece (Don’t Look Now — Britain’s Thought Crime) on this subject may recall, the bill, if past in its proposed form, will criminalise thousands of British BDSM enthusiasts simply for looking at images of so-called ‘violent’ porn. Condemned by its many critics as an unwarranted intrusion into the private behaviour of adults, the bill is a blatant attack on the human rights of a sexual minority for whom it is assumed there is not much public sympathy. It is another example of the shameful, knee-jerk, crowd-pleasing legislation the Government has been championing ever since former Home Secretary David Blunkett started proposing laws based on whatever the Daily Mail was complaining about on any given day.
In this case, however, it wasn’t a right wing newspaper that provided the ‘popular’ angle the Government was looking for. It was a campaign by Liz Longhurst, whose daughter Jane had tragically died in an erotic asphyxiation game with Graham Coutts, a man who admitted he was a user of extreme internet porn.
By the Home Office’s own admission there is no causal relationship between viewing violent imagery and committing violent acts. And Coutts’ original conviction for murdering Jane Longhurst was recently overturned by the House of Lords, which said the jury had not been presented with evidence that pointed to the death being unintended. But not wanting to let the facts spoil a good piece of legislation, the Government is going ahead with its bill anyway. Not because it thinks BDSMers who view violent porn will be inspired to commit murder, but because it can’t reach the people it really wants to prosecute, who are the porn producers.
If the law is passed, people in the UK who are found with the ‘wrong’ type of extreme porn images on their hard disks will face three years’ imprisonment and placement on the sex offenders register. Even though, according to leading human rights lawyer Rabinder Singh QC, the proposals appear incompatible with Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights as enshrined in UK law, and it is likely that “an individual will find it difficult to assess under the legislation whether he/she is committing a criminal act by viewing particular material”.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Backlash, the umbrella organisation for UK groups campaigning on BDSM and the law, is urging Brits to sign its petition asking the Prime Minister to abandon plans to make possession of ‘violent porn’ a criminal offence. It’s really important that as many people as possible do sign, because this is an attack on our personal pervy liberties that needs to be repelled. The online petition can be found here and the deadline for signatures is February 20 2007. So if you want to start the New Year in good fetish grace, you know what to do.
