Inquisition 21
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Children's rights and hypocricy
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Thought crimes law is coming
Kevin Kirk
“Law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” - Thomas Jefferson
You can always tell when the UK’s New Labour government is in trouble; because they always trot out yet another law further restricting sexual freedom. At present there is a fierce debate going on about the unprecedented number of immigrants into the UK (estimated at over 600,000 in the last year). The people are becoming increasingly unhappy, not because we are all a bunch of closet racists, as the government implied, but because the infrastructure, already creaky, is close to meltdown. The government believes that they need a huge wave of immigration to help keep wages down and to keep the economy ticking along despite their disastrous meddling. So they have a dichotomy: on the one hand they need the immigrants and the other they need the voters – at least until after next May’s Scottish elections.
So in true Labour style they’ve come up with a ‘third way’, which in this case involves taking everybody’s mind off of the trouble we’re in by trotting out yet another sex law. Hence the dodgy used car salesman doppelganger at the Home Office, Vernon Coaker, announcing out of the blue (because it hasn’t even been given parliamentary time yet) that the government is going to introduce the law banning violent pornography due to ‘overwhelming public support’.
The problem is that there never was overwhelming support. True there was a petition originally organised by Liz Longhurst in Reading (which attracted 1,500 signatures), which was bumped up by MP Martin Salter, via his website by asking viewers to click on a link (as many times as they liked) if they felt that certain named sites should be closed down (as if we could, the sites in question being hosted in the Netherlands and the Dutch Minister of Justice saying that he had no intention of closing them). The cerebrally challenged MP said: "It is great news that the Government has not only listened, but has responded to calls to outlaw access to sickening internet images which can so easily send vulnerable people over the edge.” And in order to help tip some of these vulnerable people over the edge, he helpfully provided links to the very sites he was railing about. Good move Martin, who knows how many rapist killers you have unleashed on society thanks to your stupidity; if your assertions regarding causal links between these sites and actual abuse are to be believed, that is.
His view was echoed by Liberal Democrat MP and campaign supporter Sandra Gidley, who reckons the government should have acted sooner: "It's absolutely the right decision. The scandal is it's taken so long to come to this decision. You cannot look at this sort of material and not be affected." Was this, perchance, the same Sandra Gidley who backed the call for a relaxation of the laws on pornography at the Liberal party Conference in 2004? And wasn’t one of the declarations in the policy document, agreed to by conference, that there was no evidence linking pornography to sexual assaults? Come back Charlie, Sandy needs a spanking.
Mrs Longhurst, if you remember, is the mother of the murdered school teacher Jane Longhurst, who was allegedly (the conviction was recently quashed by the Law Lords and will probably go to a retrial) murdered by Graham Coutts. Now Mr Coutts had accessed websites featuring certain rather bizarre sexual acts, in particular those featuring asphyxial sex. This fetish, in case you didn’t already know, centres on the belief that you get a better orgasm if the air supply is removed just as you peak. I’m not going to dwell on the subject except to say that it has its aficionados and, unless it is undertaken with very great care, can be extremely dangerous. For example Steven Milligan, the Member of Parliament for Eastleigh, died while depriving himself of air during masturbation. If only he’d had access to those websites that show how it can be done safely, which are amongst the ones that this government are seeking to ban, then he might still be alive today. Also, murderers often try to blame other factors for their crimes to mitigate their own behaviour: look at Peter Sutcliffe who claimed he killed thirteen women because ‘God told me to do it’. Maybe we should ban religion too, just to be on the safe side.
So for the life of me I can’t see absolutely no basis for this moral storm whatsoever; for instance why is it that, given the fact that Jane Longhurst’s murder happened three years ago, there hasn’t been more murders along the same lines if there is as big a problem as the government leads us to believe there is? So why is the government going to waste scarce parliamentary time debating this issue? To answer the question we should perhaps turn to Gore Vidal who said: “In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. To be able to lock someone up or deprive him of employment because of his sex life is a very great power indeed.”
Meanwhile, of course, over 10,000 people have been killed on Britain’s overcrowded roads, murders are so commonplace they hardly make it into the news any more, drugs, gangs and casual violence are rife and the chances of being mugged in London are 1 in 10. This government certainly has some strange priorities. My take is that the government hasn’t got a clue as to how to tackle these problems so it is going for a quick soundbite. I was struck by what Sunday Telegraph Columnist Jenny McCartney said about this government: “Firstly it either ignores the problem or fudges it with a wildly short sighted policy. Then it frantically responds to the fall out with a flurry of expensive ‘public awareness campaigns’, task forces and regulatory bodies.” In other words they are floundering on the things that matter but believe that this new law will at least show that they are doing something. And they thought it would sail through with no opposition, particularly in view of the fact that a person’s sexual peccadilloes are intensely secret and they are hardly likely to vocalize their opposition to the law.
So it must have come as a considerable shock to them to find that not only were people actually standing up to be counted but they were also organising serious opposition. Groups such as Backlash (see their site here.) and the BDSM community are coming out and actively opposing it on civil liberties grounds. Not that civil liberties cut much ice with this government.
To give the law a patina of respectability the government produced, during 2005, a consultation document eliciting the views of the public. This document, needless to say, was written by two ‘child abuse’ social workers (why?) and was incredibly biased. The authors didn’t even attempt to be fair but instead bandied around words like abhorrent – it was mentioned five times – aberrant, degrading and repugnant which, coupled with the leading questions, were meant to point the consultee towards the sunlit pastures of the right conclusions. Even so there were almost twice as many people opposed to the new law as there were for it (241 against – 143 for). In other words the whole darned thing backfired on them.
But this is democracy New Labour style. So the argument goes like this: If there was a majority of people in favour of the law, then they were going with the will of the people and if there was only a minority in favour of the law then they were protecting the rights of minorities. In other words the consultation exercise was a complete waste of time. This government had absolutely no intention of listening to anybody who upsets their prejudices.
If one looks at the people who were for the new law we can see the sticky fingerprints of the Child Exploitation Industry all over the place (although I’m still puzzled as to why GCHQ felt it had to put its two pennyworth in). Just about every one of the 53 (mostly publicly funded) organisations (only 90 members of the public were in favour of the new law – hardly overwhelming public support) who ached for it had a vested interest, primarily a financial one, in bringing it in.
The same exercise was carried out by the Scottish Executive incidentally, but they were far cleverer because any submissions that were emailed that contained ‘inappropriate’ words or phrases, like BDSM or rape or even – er – the word pornography were filtered out by their anti porn software. So only those who wrote letters (like the vested interests) got their views heard. Even so they ‘accidentally’ lost over a dozen anti-law responses that did manage to get through. You can see the Scottish Responses that did get past their censorship here.
The gender warriors, so beloved by this government, were also represented as they sensed their chance to get rid of all pornography, not just the so called violent porn. Leading the fray was the Lilith Project which is a sub group of the Women’s National Commission, which is a New Labour women’s group that purports to represent the views of over eight million women. Although who, exactly, these women, they are supposed to be representing, actually are is anybody’s guess because the group is a little coy on that subject. They said they had; “regular contact with government officials who work in the area of sexual violence, particularly within the Home Office.” I didn’t realise there was a problem of sexual violence in the Home Office - where does Prescott work again?
Their submission was penned by Professor Liz Kelly CBE who is the Chair of the WNC Sexual Violence Sub-group. Professor Kelly trotted out the usual ‘porn leads to rape’ theories and even quotes the much derided (and in most cases retracted) ‘experiments’ carried out by Zillman and co . Amazingly she also mentioned the research carried out by Professor Kutchinsky who proved, using hard factual evidence provided by crime statistics, that the availability of pornography not only didn’t lead to an increase in sexual assaults but actually decreased them.
To which Professor Kelly sniffed: “Lilith reject this and suggest instead that the legalisation of pornography leads to normalisation of sexual violence and thus women in these countries are less likely to report rape.” The countries were Denmark, Sweden and Germany, where as we all know the women are all shrinking violets who won’t report being raped because the local sex shop sells smut. What absolute and utter rubbish. Has this silly woman actually been to Sweden for example? If she did she’ll find that the place is predominantly run by women and under no circumstances are they cowed into submission by smut, or anything else come to that. On the contrary the government has to run ‘art of seduction’ classes there because the women are so overbearing they are frightening off Swedish men – Sweden has the second highest incidence of ‘mail order brides’ in the world, the US is first. What does that tell you about the indigenous women in those countries? Shrinking violets? Hardly!
Of course she didn’t offer any reason or research that contradicted Professor Kutchinsky’s research except the tired old advocacy research mentioned previously. My question to her is why is it that in Japan, where almost all pornography is legal, the rape rate is 11 times lower than the UK and that the UK, which has the most stringent censorship laws, has the highest incidence of rapes in Europe and the sixth highest in the world? Is she going to eat her words when, as I predict, the incidence of violent rapes increases still further after this law is passed? Or will she call for even more stringent censorship of say the Sun? Whose editor, the pugilistic Rebekkah Wade, says that posing for porn is ‘liberating’ for women.
The learned professor stated that: “By etymological definition pornography is the depiction of whores.” Actually it is not, if she bothered to study her classical Greek, it is actually from the word pornographos which means the writings or sayings of, not about, whores which kind of demolished the great tottering edifice of her subsequent argument.
She also invited the government to read the transcripts of the public hearings on Ordinances to add Pornography as Discrimination Against Women in Minneapolis and deadly dull they are too. These public hearings were the high point of the great McKinnon/Dworkin anti porn crusade to try and get porn banned in the US. McKinnon in her testimony said: “Pornography is central in creating and maintaining the civil inequality of the sexes. Pornography is a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms women. The bigotry and contempt it promotes, with the acts of aggression it fosters, harm women's opportunities for equality of rights in employment, education, property rights, public accommodations and public services; create public harassment and private denigration; promote injury and degradation such as rape, battery and prostitution and inhibit just enforcement of laws against these acts; contribute significantly to restricting women from full exercise of citizenship and participation in public life, including in neighborhoods; damage relations between the sexes; and undermine women's equal exercise of rights to speech and action guaranteed to all citizens under the constitutions and laws of the United States and the State of Minnesota.” This was one of the more lucid pronouncements at the hearings, which were all hearsay with no scientific backing. Needless to say the city council didn’t believe a word of it and voted down the ordinance but the good professor forgot to mention that bit.
Instead she mentioned the laughably biased Meese Commission report which, against all the evidence, asserted that there was a causal link between porn and sexual assaults because that is what they’d been told to do. Even US legislators are too embarrassed to do anything other than ignore that report (apart from the raising the ages of child porn to cover erotic depictions of 16 and 17 year olds which was first proposed in it), so why should UK legislators bother? To be fair she should have also mentioned the Lockhart or Williams reports, but they would have thrown a spanner in her carefully constructed machine because they recommended that all porn should be legalised.
Of course all the other usual suspects, sensing a lucrative bandwagon, put their oars in. For example Roger Darlington of the Internet Watch Foundation said that the Longhurst murder and other court cases proved that violent pornography ‘can encourage people to perform harm to other people’. My question is what other cases? There hasn’t been a single one to my knowledge. The IWF of course is keen to increase their franchise of censorship and so could hardly be counted as unbiased. They pose far more danger to our democracy with their unaccountable antics that any porn ever could. They are serving no good purpose and should be shut down forthwith.
And the largest employer in London, the increasingly politicised, Metropolitan Police got in on the act. Commander Dave Johnston welcomed the proposed new law, saying it is now difficult to deal with Web sites based abroad. "The creation of new offences to deal with these matters would assist greatly in preventing the spread of such material,” Which proves that the ‘fog in the channel, Europe cut off’ attitude is still prevalent in the Met. These sites aren’t hosted here, the Obscene Publications Act sees to that, so it will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the supply side and it won’t do much to the demand side either; the criminals that this act is meant to catch won’t be at all bothered by it and will continue to download this stuff - if you are intent on doing this stuff for real then you’d end up with the same sentence whether you downloaded it or not. It’s the poor innocent idiot that clicks on the wrong link that will suffer. The consultation said that it is a defence to have inadvertently stumbled on the material. But as we’ve seen from child porn cases. It’s notoriously difficult to prove and in the police’s eyes it doesn’t matter how you got it, it’s the fact you do have it (even if you deleted it) that counts. Once they hold those pictures up in court, you’ve had it mate.
The raison d’etre as to why the police are so itchingly keen to have this new law can be traced to a pilot scheme that is running in North Wales where policemen get 10 points (I kid you not) for each arrest they make and we all know that points means prizes. And the prize on offer here is promotion and bonuses - with intense counselling, or even dismissal, for officers who fail to make the numbers because they more interested in say, crime prevention or helping old ladies cross the street. The police reckon arrests under this new law will be easy busts, like Ore, because all they have to do is arrest anyone whose name appears on a list helpfully supplied by the VISA credit card company.. This, you must admit, is a damned sight easier than running around chasing muggers who are invariably armed.
The fact of the matter, and possible fly in the ointment for them, is that the overwhelming majority of the acts that this proposed law seeks to ban the depiction of are actually completely legal in this country. Things like BDSM (Bondage Domination and Sadomasochism) are practised by hundreds of thousands of people and viewed by millions more. According to a poll conducted by the Independent newspaper, over 11 million people (of which over 20%, and rising, are women) in the UK subscribe to pornography sites every month. This is a larger number of people than actually voted for Blair, which puts this whole sorry mess into perspective. Particularly as, according to figures by the adult industry itself, the majority (over 56%) are subscribing to the very types of site that this act wants to criminalise. This is a very sizeable chunk of the population we are taking about here and it begs the question as to what is the country going to do with these six million plus people once they’re convicted? The government evidently hasn’t thought this through, particularly as they breezily assert that only a limited number of arrests will be made. They are joking right? The police are going to love this: why do you think they’ve been agitating so hard for it? This will be Ore all over again, but this time with massive numbers. Considering Ore cost the thick end of £2 billion, can we actually afford this law?
CEOP
Inevitably, as I predicted, CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre) feels it, like the rest of the child exploitation industry has a part to play in this new crackdown, primarily because child porn is in too short supply to support a bureaucracy of their size and they are desperate to move to this fertile new area before we all cotton on. Its CEO Jim Gamble said: "Today starts to answer that need in respect of how the internet can be used to supplement this area of criminality. It builds on the fundamentals of the Obscene Publications Act 1959 and helps take our fight against violent and extreme pornography to where it needs to be - in tune with technology and in-line with how the modern criminal mind works.”
Which, to be honest, I can’t make head or tail of. He must have caught too much sun, or duty free, on those five star junkets to Bali we, the taxpayers, are so generously paying for. In particular I couldn’t work out what criminality he was talking about. Have you got any idea? It is not illegal to do this stuff and owning or even producing the material isn’t currently illegal either, only its dissemination. So he is jumping the gun somewhat - how does he know MPs will vote for it? Ok, ok I know daft question, they ALWAYS vote for anything that restricts people’s rights, particularly where sex is concerned.
The bit that tickled me was how these wunderkind policemen were going to use technology to destroy this scourge. Unlike child porn, there will be absolutely no cooperation between the internet fraternity and the police. So the technology that will be brought to bear to combat this prohibition in terms of stealth encryption and secure transmission, never mind proxy servers to bypass the IWF, will be a damned sight more sophisticated than the police will ever see. The downside, as I see it, is that the child pornographers will piggy back onto this technology for their own ends. For that reason alone this law shouldn’t be brought in. The alternative is to legislate against encryption software and that opens a completely different can of worms. And they’d have to legislate because, despite the third of a billion pounds they spend every year on PR, reasoning won’t work anymore because we no longer believe a word they say.
On the lighter side, one of the most entertaining responses to the proposals was by Sid Bonkers of the Neasden Collective (a.k.a John Beyer, Director of mediawatch-uk – which is Mary Whitehouse’s old Listeners and Viewers association with a tarted-up name) who foamed: “Despite acknowledging that many respondents felt the proposals should go further, with tighter restrictions imposed on all pornography, the Home Office has shied away from this and decided not to strengthen the weak and ineffective Obscene Publications Act but to bring forward measures to deal only with serious violence, sex with animals and corpses. It is a great disappointment that hard-core pornographic material, classified R18 by the British Board of Film Classification, has not been considered. These proposals will have no impact at all on the deluge of pornography that is accessible on television, on the Internet and on video and DVD. People are sick and tired of being confronted with pornography and its false values and would welcome a general clean up. The government’s very limited measures are simply not designed to achieve what the vast majority of people want and this huge exploitative industry will be left pretty much intact by New Labour.”
Come on admit it, wasn’t that delicious?
Of course he’s wrong: the vast majority of people couldn’t give a damn about porn (a BBFC survey showed that over 70% of people think porn should be legal), they are far more concerned about how they can pay their council taxes or gas bill, than they are about smut. And they are pretty unlikely to come in contact with porn unless they go looking for it. Plus there’s the 11 million porn downloaders to consider; they don’t need Mr Beyer’s moralizing.
Aside from the fruit loops and the vested interests – indulge me here a second, look through the list of organisations in favour of this law and then think how they would benefit if it were brought in. Now do you consider their viewpoint’s fair and reasonable and, more to the point, in the best interests of society as a whole and the maintenance of justice – just about everybody else had reservations about the proposed law.
Everyone, that is, apart from the British Psychological Society. Now this surprised me, particularly as there is no concrete evidence that this material was indeed harmful to society. And an endorsement by this group would carry huge weight once the bill is debated. The truth is that although their website mentioned the consultation, it didn’t actually make clear the date of the meeting to discuss the issue - which some members are saying was deliberate and have written dissenting viewpoints - so only the politically minded feminist wonks (Dr Carol Ireland and Fiona Wilks-Riley) in the society got put forward their viewpoints as THE views of the society. You can read more about it on the Backlash web site (http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk).
There was one statement in their submission that I profoundly disagreed with and that is that porn sexualises children – it isn’t porn that’s sexualising children, it’s this government, the child exploitation industry and the police that are turning our kids into sex objects .
Much of the opposition to the law came from people who were concerned about the unintended consequences. This government, although stuffed full of lawyers and barristers, can’t draft a decent law to save their lives and there is no comfort in thinking this one will be any better. Even in the discussion document and during the select committee they couldn’t agree on exactly what it was they were talking about. So you can bet your bottom dollar this law will be so open to misinterpretation that all sorts of material will get sucked into it.
For example the BBC said: “We are concerned that despite reassurances to the contrary, the legislation as drafted in this consultation document could inadvertently have a negative but material impact on the freedom of the BBC and the UK mainstream entertainment industry as a whole. We are also concerned about the potential impact on legitimate journalistic investigation into the subject of extreme adult pornography, in the public interest.”
Channel Four’s submission was in a very similar vein. You can see theirs, plus a number of other responses, on the Melon Farmers website (http://www.melonfarmers.co.uk).
Another very valid concern people had was that this law will make what you are thinking illegal because the court will be asked to judge whether they think you bought, say, Jodie Foster’s movie Shame because of the important social commentary of this wicked crime or you a perv who got his rocks off on it. Do we really want, or need, an offence of thought crime in this country just so politicians can strut their moral stuff instead of getting to grips with the real problems the country is facing. Already more time has been spent discussing this issue than ever went into our commitment in Afghanistan or even Parliament’s decision to invade Iraq. This cannot be right.
The select committee that first discussed this law were concerned about the human rights aspect of any prohibition and Vera Baird, who is no fan of free speech or civil liberties and is an arch feminist to boot, said she’d fund a loophole for them. Even so the eminent human rights QC Rabinder Singh said in his consideration on behalf of the Spanner Trust that it will most probably fail because it breaches articles 8 and 10 of the Human Rights Act. All this is moot because this government will bring it in anyway. So my predictions as to what will happen once the new law comes into effect will be:
A huge list of 10,000 plus people will suddenly appear and a nationwide series of dawn raids will take place, with full press attendance, particularly aimed at the BDSM community. And don’t think you’ll be safe because you’ve got rid of it when it became illegal either – it won’t matter if they don’t find anything after confiscating your computer for months (they are desperately short of computer forensics). You will be, in the eyes of the local press, a suspected sex pervert. Try having a normal life after that – acquitted or not.
The first cases will hit court and they will be, ultimately, thrown out because of the Human Rights Act.
The Home Office will whip up a media storm about possible repeal of certain parts of the Human Rights Act (namely sections 7 onwards). A Home Office spokesman will say they are fighting the ECHR on our behalf to protect our nation’s morals against this evil filth.
The press will be told about the 10,000+ sex fiends that are living in our communities and its only Europe and soppy old human rights that are stopping the police going after them and saving us.
The child rights industry, in particular CEOP, will get in on the act saying we must repeal the HRA to protect children.
Jim Gamble of CEOP will be all over the press saying that 9 out of 10 child molesters have this material and it’s being used to groom children.
The feminists will say that the HRA must be repealed to save women and ‘vulnerable people’ from harm.
Now, this is where it gets interesting because the government may well repeal the Human Rights Act, and even consider opting out of the European convention, using this as an excuse and the Tories will support them. From then on who knows? We’ve already seen that child porn has been used as an excuse to censor the internet.
But to be perfectly honest the main reason that I am opposed to this legislation is because I’m fed up with being treated like a child. I’m also sick to the teeth with the ‘all men are rapists’ that we keep getting from the feminists – how would they like it if I said all women are whores? I am neither a rapist, nor a molester and have no intention of being one irrespective of what I see and that goes for 99.99% of all men in this country. All the arguments in favour of suppression since sexual censorship first reared its ugly head in the 1800s have been flawed and, in most instances based on faked evidence presented by vested interests, leading to a moral panic, subsequent ill conceived legislation and terrible miscarriages of justice.
And this one will be no different. We neither want nor need this law.
As Thomas Jefferson so succinctly put it: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
Children's rights and hypocricy
Thought crimes law is coming
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