Britain Bans Fetish Porn

The United Kingdom has succumbed to moral hysteria and banned all possession of what is being called “extreme pornography”, with the law having come into effect on the 26th of January, tacked on to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

Actually committing many of the acts will remain legal for the time being, although in at least one case possessing photographs of the act actually attracts the same sentence as committing the act itself.

With the proviso that “a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real”, the following photographic depictions of “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise obscene” sexual acts are now given similar sentences to what one might receive for violent crime:

(a) an act which threatens a person’s life
(b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals
(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse
(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive)

Clearly, most of these are intended to attack BDSM pornography; the law expressly states that whether the participants are consenting, or the act is clearly staged, is irrelevant. The various qualifications about injury are all interpreted by a judge or jury, which suggests convincing them of the material’s illegality and obscenity will not be challenging.

The bill happily provides examples of what is definitely out: “depictions of hanging, suffocation, or indecent assault involving a threat with a weapon; the insertion of sharp objects into or the mutilation of breasts or genitals.”

Bestiality porn is now completely illegal in the UK, though bizarrely the maximum sentence for actually committing bestiality (which is of course illegal in the UK) is 2 years, the same sentence for possessing photographs of it. Perhaps thinking criminal thoughts is as threatening as the actual acts to the proponents of such legislation?

Another bizarre element of the law is that it provides a defence against conviction for those actually photographed engaged in the acts, if they can prove they “directly participated” (photographers looking on still get jail time).

The maximum sentence is 3 years for bondage porn, 2 for the rest. Those convicted of 2 or more years will find themselves placed on the same sex offender register as rapists and similar.

Aside from the “reality” provisions above, drawn depictions are excluded from the law for now, although it does not take much imagination to see what the next iteration of the law will be targeting. The basis for this law is after all preventing people becoming “depraved”, rather than acting in defence of any “victims”, so it is no leap to extend it even further.

The background to the law is that a madman with a substantial collection of fetish porn strangled to death a women for his perverse gratification. Her vengeful mother then launched a moral crusade against the evils of Internet porn (with non-existent “snuff” porn being trotted out to prove their point), which nobody save SM maniacs bothered to oppose.

With the help of a truck driver cum Labour MP, Martin Salter, evidently keen to burnish his anti-porn feminist credentials, the law was promoted as being targeted against “extreme internet sites promoting violence against women in the name of sexual gratification”.

He has this to say:

“No-one is stopping people doing weird stuff to each other but they would be strongly advised not to put it on the internet.”

“At the end of the day it is all too easy for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind.”

“These snuff movies and other stuff are seriously disturbing. Many police officers who have to view it as part of their job have to undergo psychological counselling.”

“It simply plugs a hole in the law because the Obscene Publications Act is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard as far as the internet is concerned. This new law is designed to meet the challenge of the internet.”

As they discovered it was difficult to ban the “stuff” in such bastions of liberty as the USA, they opted instead to criminalise the people viewing the sites.

Since the British people have no real rights other than those agreed upon by a hall full of rowdy politicians and another populated by appointed favourites of the ruling party, the act passed into law without much difficulty.

Predictably, this is of great interest to Wikipedians. You can find the details collated in some detail on Wikipedia.

The UK’s inexorable slide into becoming a second-rate police state continues; successive leftist governments have shown nary a concern for civil liberties in imposing an increasingly intrusive surveillance society on the British Isles, with cameras even reaching into the classroom, and lately have taken to increasingly moralistic pandering and other illiberal policies, perhaps to distract from their inept economic stewardship.

With an electorate whose only abiding concern appears to be house prices, and a set of “fundamental rights” guaranteed by the EU which are incapable of defending even the most basic freedom of expression, the formerly liberal nature of the UK appears to be giving way to pure democracy, a terrifying prospect if ever there were one.