EVIL PLACE, the internet. When not tempting terrorists with sarin recipes, it is irresponsibly serving German cannibals their dinner, leading Japanese depressives to suicide and reuniting blameless friends to commit extramarital affairs. As if we weren’t being sufficiently depraved and corrupted, the Home Office has now uncovered a shocking online stash of extreme and violent pornography. It’s a wonder that Anglo-American forces have not yet invaded the net in search of the elusive, order-restoring “off” switch.
This latest internet panic concerns pornographic images that unquestionably go beyond what society, certainly the Obscene Publications Acts, would consider morally acceptable: images depicting bestiality, necrophilia, rape or torture, all now electronically available in just a couple of mouse-clicks. Material of this nature would not be permitted in licensed sex shops or in films, yet until now it has not been illegal to view it online. Hence the enthusiasm of the Home Office and the Scottish Executive to legislate to ban UK citizens from pointing their computers towards their hosts’ mostly foreign-based web servers.
It is, superficially, an attractive notion that criminalising the sight of “extreme” images will cleanse the national psyche. The “net porn pervs” demonised by the popular press for accessing these often repulsive websites will find no support here: personally, I find the sites’ profitable existence worrying, the ever-growing demand for them more so.
But however well-intentioned, the Government’s desire to play censor will meet technological, cultural and practical barriers that simply were not there in the battle to confront illegal child pornography. The online exploitation of children for sexual gratification, by international consensus, is so closely linked to their physical exploitation that a global effort continues successfully to limit its availability. Try achieving a similarly agreed global definition of “corrupting ” adult porn — and then consider how Ofcom, or our strained police forces, can ever secure Britain’s digital borders.
It is always unwise to legislate in response to a single emotive crime, and the current government consultation owes rather too much momentum to the brutal murder of Jane Longhurst, the Sussex teacher strangled two years ago. Her killer, Graham Coutts, was a regular visitor to such charming websites as Necrobabes, Death by Asphyxia and Hanging Bitches, and the day before the murder he spent about 90 minutes exploring images of necrophilia and asphyxial sex. Jane’s mother, Liz Longhurst, believes that the internet “normalised” Coutts’s disturbing sexual fantasies, convincing him that “he was not alone in harbouring these sick thoughts”. Her remarkable campaign, including a 35,000-signature petition, has persuaded MPs that the solution lies in criminalising the possession of such images, blocking access to the sites and giving Ofcom a new role as internet policeman.
These websites certainly appealed to Coutts’s disturbingly violent sexuality. But does that really justify the conclusion, as voiced by David Lepper, Jane Longhurst’s MP, that the internet “doubtless led to Jane’s death”? It is an assumption that needs to be thoroughly tested before a neutral communications channel is blamed for inciting, rather than reflecting, one of the darkest aspects of human nature. Murderers enacted their horrific fantasies long before a few million computers were linked together: maybe we should have been blaming books.
The internet undoubtedly makes such degrading images easier to find, and reinforces a sense of community among those stimulated by them. Yet there is simply too little convincing research to demonstrate that extreme pornography initiates acts of violence. Indeed, some psychologists argue the opposite — that it provides a safe outlet for those who might otherwise enact their malevolent fantasies.
There is also a wider question of definition. As Baroness Scotland of Asthal, the Home Office Minister. pointed out in a Lords debate last year, “there is no international consensus on what constitutes obscenity, or when the freedom of an adult to have access to obscene or pornographic material should be constrained”. In our increasingly atomised media culture, built around ever more niche consumer segmentation, who is to determine where “regular” pornography becomes “extreme”? Now that would be a fun Ofcom committee to sit in on. If a simulated rape sequence is unacceptable today, what about consensual S&M or even gay sex tomorrow? What tends to deprave or corrupt one person may prove perfectly inoffensive to another. Yet once the Government begins to pull down the curtains on the legally permissible internet, how can we prevent short-term political pressures determining what is safe for our private consumption?
Where children are involved, there is no such moral ambiguity. Few national governments or police forces would not consider child pornography a degrading and exploitative evil. That is why it has proved relatively easy to win international co-operation to close down such websites.
But try reaching agreement on unacceptable adult violence. If one jurisdiction accepts the Home Office view, the pornographers will merely move their web servers to another. Unless Britain adopts a Chinese-style firewall, that digital detritus might just leap over our national borders. And with barely 250 specialist police officers to examine computers in suspected child-porn and terrorist cases, who in practice is going to enforce the ban? You can bet that the profit-driven pornographers will find ways of remaining one step ahead.
When the Lords considered the matter, Baroness Buscombe, a Tory peer, had an answer: force computer shops to pre-install government-approved filters. Forget, for a moment, the limitations of such software, which will inevitably block entirely innocent pet-care pages. The notion assumes that undesirable content will be accessed only on static web pages, rather than through email, news groups, peer-to-peer networks or whatever mobile technology follows tomorrow. The Lords also appear not to have noticed the extraordinary boom in content created by ordinary citizens.
The internet needs to be understood simply as another communication channel for those depraved, flawed sexual beings called adults. We already have clear and effective laws against murder, rape, bestiality and any other crimes that pornographic websites are supposedly inciting. To legislate for a digital black pencil may satisfy immediate demands for action. But where the internet is concerned, legally enforceable bans rarely achieve their goal. Just ask the next eBay fraudster or penis-extension spammer who contacts you.
