The Blair government in Britain is proposing new legislation
to ban not just the production and sale but the possession of extreme
“violent and abusive” p*rnography. The Home Office’s consultation paper
referred to material that “depicts suffering, pain, torture and
degradation which we believe most people would find abhorrent.”

No doubt the government is counting on the fact that such material will
have few defenders. But the right of adults to watch what they choose
in private should not be hostage to the unpopularity of their tastes.
And playing fast and loose with free speech is a dangerous game: as an
op-ed piece in The Times
last week put it, “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?”

Apart from the sheer impracticality of policing the internet without
chilling free speech in general, there are two further problems with
this line of regulation. First, no-one is actually proposing to clean
up the multitude of images of “suffering, pain, torture and
degradation” that Hollywood and its competitors produce every week. The
message is not that violence is bad, just that violence linked with s*x
is bad. In other words, s*x is the element that makes the otherwise
normal unacceptable – the complete opposite of a healthy attitude.

The other problem is that this sort of ban has the odd effect of making
the claims that support it impossible to test. We have already seen
this with the witch-hunt against child p*rnography: supporters of
controls tell us that the internet is filled with easily-accessible
images of unspeakable depravity, yet any researchers or commentators
who try to verify this claim are themselves breaking the law. If
additional areas are cordoned off, hysterical arguments will be that
much easier to make, and we will head into a downward spiral of
controls.