It is impossible not to feel profound sympathy for Liz Longhurst, whose daughter Jane was killed in 2003 by a man said to be obsessed with violent internet pornography.
Even so, it would be profoundly misguided to support the bill to criminalise the viewing of such material announced last week by the British Government. This bill, inspired by the anti-porn campaign launched by Mrs Longhurst after her daughter’s death, aims to make the viewing of extreme internet porn punishable by three years’ imprisonment and placement on the sex offenders’ register.
The bill would outlaw images of pornographic, explicit and real or apparently real acts of serious violence, necrophilia and bestiality — ‘serious violence’ being defined here as that which ‘appears to be life-threatening or likely to result in serious, disabling injury’. It seeks to do this despite every stage of the process which produced these proposals being flawed, from the verdict in the original trial of Jane Longhurst’s killer to the dubious weighting given to special interest groups in the later public consultation.
Ostensibly, the Government’s reason for criminalising the mere viewing of such imagery is that the the ban on its production and distribution already in place hasn’t made any difference in Britain, since it is mostly produced outside our shores but still, thanks to the internet, easily accessible here. Unfortunately though, the idea that you could be sent to prison for three years just for looking at a picture is recognised even by the arrogant authors of this legislation as a bit much to expect Joe Public to stomach. So what they’ve done to make it more palatable is nurture the belief that looking at such images can actually make people commit violent crimes.
At the very centre of the pro-legislation case, whose supporters include the police, women’s rights organisations and child welfare groups, is the unfounded contention that viewing violent sexual images causes people to commit violent sex acts. While it may be true that violent people enjoy violent imagery, all reliable evidence points towards violent disposition, not the viewing of violent imagery, as the actual motivator for violent acts.
Ironically, the verdict in the very case that inspired the new bill has just been overturned by the highest court in the land, the House of Lords — not exactly an auspicious start for a new piece of legislation. The Law Lords found that the conviction of Graham Coutts for the murder of Jane Longhurst by asphyxiation was unsound. The judges pointed out that Coutts had engaged in breath play games with previous partners years before he started using internet porn, and that if presented with this evidence, rather than the evidence of Coutts’ use of porn, the jury would have been likely to accept that he did not intend to kill. It seems this would almost certainly have led to a conviction for manslaughter rather than murder, an option the jury was not offered. At the time of writing, Coutts is still in custody awaiting probable retrial.
Interestingly, the Home Office has accepted elsewhere that there is no evidence that viewing porn leads to copycat behaviour. But it seems that the desire to criminalise porn has overridden the fundamental principle of evidence-based legislation.
When you consider the actual imagery which upsets Mrs Longhurst and other campaigners, you find presumption again taking precedence over evidence. No reasonable person could defend extreme imagery which truly has been created without the informed and uncoerced consent of the participants. But a serious blindspot of many people upset by what they regard as extreme imagery is that they simply cannot believe such imagery could ever be produced consensually. They cannot believe that people depicted as the ‘victims’ in scenes of extreme SM could possibly be involved of their own free wills, let alone be enjoying the experience. And for those who already see all porn as the abuse of women, the fact that most heterosexual extreme porn depicts females on the ‘receiving end’ just makes the crime more heinous. The fact that in the world of internet BDSM, most of the women appearing on extreme sites are either enthusiastic amateurs in it for the kicks, or aspiring or established professionals who utilise their personal sexual proclivities to earn a living, is simply discounted.
Liz Longhurst’s admission on a BBC Radio 4 interview that she had never actually seen any of the imagery which she sought to criminalise shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. She told the interviewer that she thought it was too dangerous for her to view it. She also indicated that she thinks snuff movies exist on the internet, and that much of the other violent internet porn imagery (that also, by her own admission, she has never seen) must involve coercion.
As a genteel middle class lady now in her seventies, Mrs Longhurst might be expected to make such assumptions. But what excuse have the police got? One would hope today’s police would have rather different priorities from those of their colleagues back in the early 1990s who, in the notorious Operation Spanner, arrested 14 gay men for engaging in acts of extreme but consensual SM. One would hope today’s police would have a rather more informed view of human sexuality than those officers who, watching videos of the Spanner men’s activities, immediately assumed they were watching snuff movies.
But given the apparent enthusiasm of the police for this bill, one has to assume that not that much has changed. So if the police themselves cannot be relied upon to recognise (or indeed be interested in) the difference between depictions of consensual SM and depictions of actual non-consensual violence, whose criteria should we apply to the judgement of whether an image is sufficiently extreme and sufficiently real to fall foul of the law? The Home Office has said it is prepared to offer ‘non-statutory guidance’ on this question, which evokes images of checklists pinned up next to people’s computers, that they can refer to whenever they click on something that might be dodgy.
The Government has also said that people who ‘accidentally’ view banned material have nothing to worry about — but how exactly is that supposed to work? Do they imagine that, without this reassurance, there are people in Britain who, innocently clicking on a banned image, would voluntarily turn themselves in to the police? And how many banned pictures will you be allowed to look at accidentally before you’re considered to be doing it on purpose?
What it boils down to is a very good chance that people will genuinely not know if imagery they’ve downloaded is illegal until they’ve been successfully prosecuted for possessing it. You might wonder how any kind of civilised society could tolerate such a ludicrous state of affairs. But when it comes to the outer reaches of sexual behaviour, this is the British way — to make the laws covering it so unspecific, so much of a grey area, that the only way to be absolutely safe is to stay so far from the edge as to be utterly harmless. Or not do it at all.
History also shows us that such laws are not enforced fairly and even-handedly, as Mrs Longhurst might hope. There will be no nationwide brigade of porn wardens patrolling our streets night and day on the lookout for anyone who puts a foot wrong. What will happen is that the authorities will target one or two relatively ordinary people (perhaps someone who works with children or in another equally sensitive area); then, even though they’ve never done any harm to anyone, they will be made examples of by the courts and their lives will be ruined — because the authoritarian mindset behind such tactics considers this the surest way to terrorise everyone else into acquiescence.
So why is the Government doing this? Why, when it has already been criticised so much for dismantling civil liberties, would it want to be seen to be moving yet again in the direction of the dark ages, and against the spirit of current European thinking on human rights? Several possible explanations have been suggested.
The first, and most Orwellian, is that this legislation represents the foot in the door to the real objective — total regulation of the internet within UK boundaries. The internet is a powerful, independent and multi-faceted resource which poses an enormous threat to any government desirous of controlling the way we think. A government that wishes to control internet access within its borders might well look for a specific area of web activity that it thinks the electorate would broadly disapprove of, such as violent pornography, then use legislation against this specific aspect as a stepping stone to complete regulation. Which it would present as, regrettably, the only effective way to stop these nasty people from flooding your homes with filth.
Another suggestion is that the strong puritanical element within New Labour is as keen as any previous Government has been to deny us the kind of freedoms of sexual choice enjoyed by other western societies, but is too cowardly to be seen as the initiator of yet more liberty-crushing, pleasure-denying legislation. So the Government encourages special interest groups to do most of the initial dirty work, allowing it to step in later with a legitimate ‘response’ in the form of a public consultation. Then, despite the consultation attracting more individual pro-porn than anti-porn submissions (even with e-mail filtering that stopped some submissions containing explicit language being filed), the Home office goes ahead with the bill it was going to introduce anyway.
Or perhaps the whole thing started out as another knee-jerk reaction to right-wing pressure that just got out of hand. Perhaps they never really thought it would get this far. That at least would explain why they put up Home Office minister Vernon Coaker to answer questions on BBC Radio 4’s influential lunchtime news programme The World At One on Wednesday August 30, when the Government announced the proposed law. Coaker’s faltering responses to questions about exactly who wanted this legislation, and why, made him sound more like a cop explaining to a court why he arrested someone for groining him in the knee than a minister championing his department’s latest initiative. What he said seemed to be roughly equivalent to “it’s nothing to do with us”.
Whatever response the Government anticipated to its announcement, I suspect it did not reckon on the level of opprobrium that would be heaped upon its proposals from all sides in the following 24 hours. The interesting thing was that while there was the expected, well-considered response from Backlash (the UK BDSM coalition set up to fight such legislation), and predictable concern from liberal media such as The Guardian, there was also dissention within the Tory ranks, not least from Tom Utley writing in the Daily Mail. But it was in the online realm that the most damning indictments of the bill appeared. The BBC’s website had an insightful blog from News At Ten editor Craig Oliver discussing the issues raised by his programme’s coverage of the story, while a wonderfully vitriolic piece by Guardian Unlimited’s Frank Fisher generated a massive debate among the online community, who gave the bill an overwhelming thumbs-down.
Such a broad-ranging, intelligent and fast public response would not have been possible without today’s wired-up society. Now, commenting online is the default way for people to have their say on issues like this, and boy, they don’t pull their punches. No wonder governments don’t like the internet.
The British do not want or need this stupid, ill-founded piece of legislation. The Government should recognise this, and take advantage of the get-out it has wisely provided for itself in not publishing a Parliamentary timetable for the bill. The Home Office can put its hand on its heart and say to the special interest groups with completely honesty, “We did our bit, but in the end, public opinion was against us”, and then just quietly forget about the whole thing. It’s not as if it doesn’t have more serious concerns to worry about.
FURTHER READING
If you have the time, I really recommend clicking on the following links.
For the official response of UK BDSM activist coalition Backlash; also a useful detailed roundup of press coverage of the story to date: www.backlash-uk.org.uk
Frank Fisher’s Guardian Unlimited article See No Evil, and comments: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/frank_fisher/2006/08/see_no_evil.html
Craig Oliver’s All Sides Of The Story blog about BBC’s News At Ten coverage, and comments: www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2006/08/all_sides_of_the_story.html#commentsanchor
Last but not least, the Government’s consultation document on extreme pornography: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-extreme-porn-3008051/
