Kneejerking off
The government has announced plans to make the possession of violent porn punishable by three years in jail. This follows a campaign by Liz Longhurst whose daughter Jane, a Brighton schoolteacher, was killed by Graham Coutts.
She started a petition last November and a number of MPs – including the solicitor general, Harriet Harman – jumped on the bandwagon.
The proposed law will make it illegal to possess “material featuring violence that is, or appears to be, life-threatening or is likely to result in serious and disabling injury”.
According to Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance:
If you are criminalising possession then you are giving police inquisitorial powers to come into your house and see what you’ve got, now we didn’t have this in the past.
So what’s the justification for this law? Not much, to say the least, as Brendan O’Neill points out:
For a consultation on extreme pornographic material, the [consultation] document says seriously little about what this material is, where it is, how many people are accessing it, or what its effects can be. What exactly is extreme porn? ‘It is not possible in a public document like this to give a great deal of graphic detail or description of the material in question.’ Does such porn really warp people’s minds and make them do bad things? ‘We do not yet have sufficient evidence from which to draw any definite conclusions as to the likely long-term impact of this kind of material on individuals generally.’ (Though this doesn’t stop them from arguing, more than once, that aberrant sexual material might drive individuals to commit ‘aberrant sexual acts’.)
How many people are accessing violent porn? ‘According to a major research study…57 per cent of 9 to 19-year-olds who use the internet at least once a week had come into contact with pornography online. [But] the study did not distinguish between types of pornography.’ In short: dunno.
This legislation is a kneejerk response to an isolated incident and does nothing to ‘protect society’ from itself or anything else.
