Extreme Pornography News

Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 comes into force on 26 January and makes owning extreme porn pictures a criminal offence punishable by up to three years' imprisonment.

An image is deemed to be extreme if it is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character and portrays in any way an act which threatens a person's life, or which results or appears likely to result in serious injury to someone's genitals or breasts.

Members of Britain's BDSM (bondage, domination and sado-masochism) community, as well as those in the gothic and alternative scenes, complain that they are being unfairly targeted. I firmly agree that images of non-consensual activities which involve violence should be criminalised but this is a badly worded law that risks criminalising thousands of ordinary people, said Claire Lewis, a 35-year-old disabled rights activist from Manchester who has set up the Consenting Adult Action Network (Caan). The Government seems to be convinced that if people like us look at pictures for too long we'll end up turning into abusers. That's outrageous.

Caan campaigners plan to burn their pornography collections outside Parliament. A second group, Backlash, is hiring lawyers from the leading human rights firm Bindmans to contest cases when they come to court.

Myles Jackman, Backlash's legal adviser, said: Ultimately it will be up to a magistrate and a jury to decide what constitutes extreme pornography but the wording is so impossibly vague it could constitute anything. Take the phrase 'life-threatening'. There is, I understand, a genre of porn known as 'smoking pornography' which you could argue combines pornography with a potentially life threatening act.

Its supporters include the photographer Ben Westwood, eldest son of the fashion designer Vivienne. He fears some of his pictures, which often show images of people bound and gagged, could be outlawed in the new year. I simply don't believe it is the Government's business to interfere in people's sexuality. What particularly offends me is that these laws were brought in without any consultation whatsoever with the people they affect. That is not a democracy.

The law is a significant change in direction for policing pornography in Britain because it shifts the burden of guilt from those making the pornography to those viewing it.

Enthusiasts of gothic horror and burlesque shows – which often feature pseudo-violence such as fake knives and participants covered in mock blood, say they are concerned that their artistic creativity will be stifled.

There are also concerns about how the law will be policed. Caan has taken a dossier of images to three major police forces: not one could yet say which pictures would be deemed illegal. One month ahead of the legislation being enacted, the Association of Chief Police Officers has yet to draw up any guidelines on how it is to be policed.

...Read full article

The possession of extreme porn will become illegal on 26th January 2009.

CANN have produced a short summary of what people may consider deleting to stay within the law:

There is still understandably a lot of panic and fear both around what to delete and how to delete it. Hopefully we'll have a detailed guide to ‘How to delete your porn' on the website in the new year. But as a rough guide…

What Should you Delete?

We just don't know for sure, and neither does anyone else (including lawyers we have spoken to), so here's the rough overview:

1. Images have to be realistic. (photographs, unrated films, clips from rated films, good cgi, photorealistic art)
    
2. AND images need to be pornographic. (but context on your computer, or in a collection, can MAKE it deemed to be pornographic/used for sexual arousal).
    
3. AND the image needs to show some level of ‘serious' harm to breasts anus or genitals that isn't qualified exactly, or a life threatening activity (ie involving threat with a weapon)…and we presume things like asphyxiation.
    
4. AND the image needs to be judged “grossly offensive” by a jury.

The definitional detail just won't start to evolve until there have been instances tried in court.

If you want to be sure not to fall foul of this act… delete everything you have that has any level of violence or threat in it… we all have to make our own judgement call on this.

How Do You Delete It?

For images in your computer:

• If you are non-techy just delete the stuff.
• If you are techy, you need to delete stuff beyond your own abilities to retrieve it.

Consenting Adult Action Network (CAAN) has been seeking official guidance for individuals uncertain whether material in their possession would fall foul of the extreme porn law,

Both police and the Ministry of Justice have told concerned individuals to send such material to the IWF for assessment.

However, the IWF poured cold water on this idea, pointing out that such material was wholly outside their remit. A spokeswoman for the IWF said: Our role is that of an assessment and takedown body: we are not there to provide classification advice for the public.

In respect of indecent material featuring child abuse, our remit covers sites hosted both in the UK and overseas. We will refer sites hosted here to the police for further action, and where we deem sites hosted abroad to contain potentially illegal material, they will be added to the list of blocked sites that we provide to ISPs.

That is not the case with Obscene material: nor will it be the case with extreme porn. With those categories, our remit will only go so far as to refer sites hosted in the UK to the appropriate authorities.

...Read full article

[Presumably the list of blocked sites is limited so as to not overly impact download times. I guess that the IWF don''t want to see valuable slots in the list taken up by adult consensual material].

A Register reader has been left baffled by the reaction of her local police force when they were asked what exactly is likely to constitute an actionable image when the extreme porn laws come into force in January.

Although the Ministry of Justice has issued its own guidelines the message has yet to filter down to local forces. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act comes into force in late January.

...Read full article

Confronted with any ‘abnormal' sexual behaviour, Labour's first instinct is to criminalise it.

If you liked Monty Python's Meaning of Life , you probably liked Mr Blackitt. Who? He's the bluff northerner who reduced the entire protestant religion to just one simple issue: according to Mr Blackitt, the main significance of Martin Luther's protest in 1517 was that four hundred years later I can wear whatever I want on my John Thomas.

Not only! His long-suffering wife is amazed to learn that this religious dispensation extended to French ticklers too. There's a lesson here for politicians: one I was reminded of recently when talking to a long-term gay activist. He acknowledged that Labour in office had done many positive things for the gay community. “All the same”, he added ruefully, “they don't really want to know. Talk to them about gay rights in terms of sex and sexuality and they get very nervous.

“They are happiest thinking of homosexuals as a bunch of victims, discriminated against on social and economic grounds for an accident of birth. Mention the mechanics of the act: juxtapose words like ‘cock' and ‘bum', and they suddenly become very deaf indeed.”

...Read full article [pdf scroll to page 20]