18 Jan 2008 | Comment
The parliamentary debate on “violent pornography” is in danger of allowing personal tastes to overshadow compelling, factual arguments, writes Julian Petley
In June 2007, the government introduced its 54th Criminal Justice Bill. This puts 19 new offences onto the statute book, and the probation officers union estimates that these could add 3000 more people to the prison population (already at a record 81000). Amongst these could well be people guilty of possessing, albeit unwittingly, the “wrong” kind of pornography.
Clause 64 of the bill criminalises the possession of what it calls “extreme pornographic images.” Such an image is one which both “appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal” and “is an image of any of the following—
- an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,
- an act which results in or appears to result in (or be likely to result in) serious injury to a person’s anus, breast or genitals,
- an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,
- a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal,
where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.”
The operative word here, of course, is “appears”, which will criminalise the possession of not only vast swathes of perfectly consensual BDSM material but will make anyone think twice before purchasing, say, a DVD of a fictional feature film which contains scenes of real sex but simulated violence. For example, the hard-core version of Tinto Brass’s Caligula, which I’ve just purchased from that sink of pornographic depravity Amazon.com.
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30 Nov 2007 | Comment
Vladimir Putin is ultimately responsible for last weekend’s oppression of political demonstrations, writes Oksana Chelysheva
There are two Russias nowadays. One is of Putin, with his images on every other bill board, trying hard to crush, scare and harass the other, democratic Russia.
Late Sunday evening I spoke by phone with Ella Poliakova, the chair of Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committee of Saint Petersburg. She had spent almost eleven hours in a police station. She was not detained during last weekend’s violently crushed march of dissent. Ella followed her friend Natalia Evdokimova, the chair of the Human Rights Council of Saint Petersburg, onto a police bus. She told me: “I heard an OMON [the militia of the internal affairs ministry] colonel ordering, “Detain that woman in the red overcoat”. He pointed at Natalia. I immediately rushed to her when she was being taken to the OMON bus.” A few hours later she was charged with resisting the police and participating in an unsanctioned rally.
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18 Oct 2007 | Comment, News
Truth, notoriously, is the first casualty of war. The truth about the fate of Armenians living under Ottoman rule in 1915 may not be dead yet, but it has certainly wilted in the glare of Washington lobby politics. What should be the subject of solemn commemoration, has instead become the subject of a Mexican standoff, with a plethora of international actors promising dire recriminations if their own view of that tragic history does not hold sway.
A Turkish government at odds with its own military, a democratic US Congress unmindful of the Presidency administration, America’s Armenian community and other ethnic lobbies, the small Armenian community left in Turkey, Armenia itself, even the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq have all drawn their pistols. The immediate cause of this complex matrix of bluff and double bluff is a decision by the foreign affairs committee of the US House of Representatives to recommend the passing of a resolution that would recognise an Armenian genocide.
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10 Oct 2007 | Comment, News
Unless the government has it in mind to ban the Bible, the new law announced by the government this week proposing to outlaw homophobic hate speech will be ineffective.
The major source of homophobic hatred in our society is from religious groups. Almost every single anti-gay group in Britain is religious. These groups hide behind their ‘holy’ texts, and unless the law has the backbone and resolve to ban these texts and to prosecute the priests, imams and rabbis who quote them, it is wasting its time trying to clamp down on anti-gay hate-speech.
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