NEW UK Law against "Sexual Torture" Pictures .....

[setvie]

Any more news or info about this law?

Would sites such as Hogtied, Device Bondage and HardTied be illegal under this new law?

Anyone??

Also what are snuff sites? I've never heard of them before

[ponylady]

Also what are snuff sites? I've never heard of them before

"snuff": movies that show the killings of people for sexual pleasure. *that's the short version*

there are some sites around that produce those films with faked deaths, or so they claim. but since
those are "public" i imagine they wouldn't be around for long if those films were for real.

more info can be found @ the wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_movies

[tied_up_bitch]

i think if its not physically or emotionally hurting any party's involved then it should be allowed. but that's only my opinion on the matter and im from the us but i don't think its right to take away from the bdsm or sb field.

[Hawkward]

I feel this article fits well here, I wasn't sure if such a thing deserves its own topic, but since it's to do with a change in law....

"‘Rape porn’ possession to be punished by three years in jail, David Cameron to announce"
http://metro.co.uk/2013/11/17/rape-porn ... e-4189512/

The question remains to the extent of this law
- How would it effect the BDSM community?
- How does this reflect people that view hentai - i.e. pornographic Japanese anime material (I probably worded this in the worst way possible)
- People who generally use "rape" as a fantasy, rather than have it as their sexual motive.


I'll admit, I love the casual collection of various hentai manga, I own one called "Shocking Pink", a h-manga about repopulating through an initially unwilling man. Sure if reaches the extent of being violent, too violent for real pornographic situations, but in no way does it effect how I feel towards the topic realistically. I also bought the book from a UK retailer.

Bleeeeeh, Cameron needs to be dethroned, and quick

[Tenderfoot88]

It's not just Cameron, Hawkward. It's his entire caucus, too. (Or whatever term Britain uses - the people who get Parliament voting privileges who are part of his party.) Britain does technically have a person who is theoretically capable of creating laws by herself, but she is much older than David Cameron and has enough rules and limitations on her powers that she's pretty much just ceremonial now.

And it sounds to me that they're primarily targeting the whole snuff film side of things. There's a wonderful little business in the market of selling film of rape, murder, beatings, etc. The article says the rape category, at least, had no laws against posession, merely publication, at least in Britain. This is just bringing the laws up to speed.

Most of the BDSM community is not even remotely about rape. Most BDSM porn websites I see have an extended interview with the submissive at both beginning and end of the shoot discussing the details of the scene and getting proof of verbal consent beforehand as well as confirmation that there wasn't a point where they wanted it to stop afterward. I know at least one company that has hard rules about filming the submissive's recovery if they start crying, pass out or safeword. There is the rape fantasy side of things, but that's usually a pretty minor side of things. Plus, it's really hard to argue the sub is being raped when the dom has trussed them up in a karada or something similarly intricate. (Anyone with a submissive partner out there, ask the sub to struggle next time you try intricate rope bondage - see if you can actually manage to pull something together.)

Hentai on the other hand is definitely in danger. A lot of them have scenes that are obviously rape, many of which stay rape throughout, and many of them use some kind of consent-under-duress (in Bible Black, for instance, almost every sexual encounter is either brought about by chemical aphrodisiacs (admittedly ones that produce far more enthusiasm than the typical date rape drug, but it's still the same thing) or through black magic overriding the person's normal thought processes...technically legal, but only because there's no need for laws against abuse of such magic because it doesn't exist.) It wouldn't ban Hentai altogether - there's a lot of pretty mellow hentai out there too - but it would certainly hit any of the hardcore stories.

As for rape fantasy - there's a fine line. There's rules in the US about publishing rape, too, but I've seen some scenes (proudly sporting labels from major porn publishers) that take things a step or two outside where I would have drawn the line - portrayals of rape where the acting "victim" is protesting a little too enthusiastically. Sounds like the British version of the law includes that as well. How far it ends up going is probably going to end up being decided by the judges. I'd hope the standard interview-proving-prior-consent format would work, though. As one of our (Canada's) former Prime Ministers said, "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." As long as it's between two consenting adults who are of sufficiently sound mind to understand the decisions they make, the government shouldn't have a say in things. And if those consenting adults decide they want to film what they're doing and sell it, that should be fine, too (as long as there's proof of said consent).

(Admittedly, Trudeau was talking about homosexuality being illegal in Canada at the time (specifically, his decision to table a bill to legalize it), but it applies just as much to any other thing adults might want to do with each other.)

[bound_jenny]

I have no problem with banning actual rape media, i.e. some bozo recording an actual rape with his cellphone and putting up on YouTube or selling it to a particularly unscrupulous web site, for one example. In that case, there is an actual crime going on. I put that in the same category as the video of Luka Magnotta killing and dismembering his victim. Or child porn.

A larger question may be, who will decide what the definition is, who will draw the line? Will it be a set of specific criteria or will it be according to the mood of the viewer/censor? Who will these viewers/censors be? Will they be objective and apply the law equally and impartially or will they be cherry-picked among religious/moral zealots with their own agenda? More than likely, this will end up going too far and/or in the wrong direction and targeting the wrong people, while the real criminals get away (and just drive them further underground, not out of business). Like most government interventions (lots of money spent, big visibility, poor results).

I think that they would be much better off spending their money and energy in investigating whether the rape depicted in the video was real or not, and then prosecuting the perpetrators if it's real.

Jenny.

[Hawkward]

Ah true, I hadn't thought about the consensual element behind BDSM, nor that there's more than just David Cameron at the scene on this kind of debate.

Still though, it would be interesting to know how their filtering system works, and how they monitor people. While I can see sense in that you'd want to circumvent as much interest in law-breaking as possible, for me it begs the question of how strict is their filtering, and if it stretches far enough to warrant videos shared without the consensual agreement in the uploaded footage as illicit. I'm one to learn from being told what not to do, but the law can be so vague, at the same time as being a bit to specific about what is right and wrong.

Forgive me for sounding so rash on the matter, as of late it feels like the Internet is slowly changing in ways that can't help but cause understandable fuss or concern. "What if the law goes with the shoot first, ask questions later approach" - it's thoughts like these I can't help but leave lingering at the back of my mind when news such as this crops up.
---

As for hentai - this mostly concerns me since Japan already faces its own battles against such things as lolicon for example. The last thing I'd hope for is for hentai as a form of artistic, anime inspired pornographic material to be looked down upon by the law due to how happily the creators of the medium enjoy bordering the extremes Part of me hopes it's alright since there's no real harm to any actual people, but there then lacks the consensual element, and essentially can depict scenes of rape quite openly since in essence hentai is an art form, not a practice of life.

Thanks for your thoughts, Tenderfoot, and I apologise if my grammar is a little sloppy right now, I should really get some sleep.

[Hawkward]

More than likely, this will end up going too far and/or in the wrong direction and targeting the wrong people, while the real criminals get away (and just drive them further underground, not out of business). Like most government interventions (lots of money spent, big visibility, poor results).

You reminded me of what a one of my friends said recently - "Seems like they're barking up every tree trying to find the right one".

Each time David Cameron, or another official body has formally introduced a new idea, while it might fix, or hinder one issue, it creates a lot more in the process, and what I feel is never properly addressed is the public confusion of the matters themselves which you somewhat addressed - What "exactly" counts as being illegal, or questionable to the law? I would be much more receptive to these laws if we were more clued up on what's legal without having to read up on the legislation.gov.uk site in hopes of finding an answer within the maze of paragraphs - provided the information is even there.

[Tenderfoot88]

Agreed, Jenny. And a big problem with net censorship is that governments don't seem to understand, by and large, how much broader the internet is than DNS sites and email. (DNS is the Domain Name System responsible for us being able to label web servers things like "www.boundanna.com" rather than "140.21.26.245" (No, I don't know where that IP address goes - each number is a slight adjustment of the server my computer tech classes kept projects stored on back when I was in grade 9-12.)) The use if IP addresses is sometimes called the "darknet" given people can only really find these sites if they know how to access them.

It probably gets a lot more complex than just the IP address, too - there's only 4.3 billion IP addresses (using the IPv4 system - 281 trillion using IPv6) and a lot of those are reserved for local networks (which, combined, are presented publicly as a single IP address). Plus, there's already a search engine out there that searches using the IP system rather than DNS (as google does), which allows a somewhat alarming amount of access to stuff that hasn't been deliberately published (people without good firewalls and long term internet connections). Said search engine takes notes on user behavior and passes on anomalous behavior to authorities, so it's not quite the hacking tool it seems like it would be. Point being, it wouldn't be that difficult for some group with NSA level processing capabilities to monitor the entire set of IP addresses for illegal activity. But then, i think the NSA and all of its non-American counterparts are more interested in intelligence and counterintelligence than petty matters like human suffering and crime.

But yes, the bigger concern is dealing with the producers of such videos. Just like child porn - look up Project Spade if you want a recent success with this kind of approach - arrested more than 350 pedophiles and freed hundreds of children.

Like I said, though, the limits of any law like this are probably going to be defined by judges themselves. The whole issue of precedence. Let's hope the first judge to get a borderline case decides to be lenient.

Regarding actual enforcement, it'll likely be along similar lines of child porn. There's hardcoded privacy laws in most of the constitutions in the developed world that prevent outright monitoring of internet access. And for the most part, ISPs seem to be very much on the public's side. They tend to have pretty strict rules about releasing data without a warrant specifically demanding such data (they're also pretty good about obeying warrants, but they're not going to offer up the data for government perusal, and they're pretty strict about how cops use the "probable cause" exception.). Such privacy laws make investigating child porn a major pain in the ass, especially since they don't have the national security style excuses that the sigint intelligence agencies like the Americans' NSA gets. It's understandable to be a little concerned, but judges tend to tread carefully around constitutionally enshrined rights like freedom of expression and privacy. (At least, in North America; my knowledge of British judges is pretty much limited to knowing to say "my Lord" to them rather than "your Honor")

The Hentai issue is problematic for several reasons. There's the whole lolicon thing, as you say (A lot of the supposedly adult characters attend schools that look suspiciously like high schools rather than university campuses, for instance - and if Death Note's portrayal is accurate, the universities in Japan have a comparable format (large campus with offices and enormous lecture halls) to those seen in North America...even in the country that doesn't seem to understand the difference between a university and a college. There's the rape issue (characters clearly being abused, taken advantage of, etc). There's the gross out factor (tentacles, demons, literally fucking to death...a scene in bible black involving a character being stabbed and raped as he bleeds out comes to mind...stuff that is definitely not hot, at least for most people). And there's the general perception of it as being specifically intended as animated porn (which a lot of it is), rather than telling a story that uses sex as a plot device. (The distiction being pornography being about the turn on, story based being about the story.)

That said, I don't think the distinction that nobody's actually getting hurt will play well. Going by that article, it sounds like the law is based more around the moral concept of women being harmed as entertainment - the whole issue of normalizing abuse of women in society. Basically it's based on the same logic as the whole video games inducing violence because violence becomes normal to players of such games. Said logic applies oh so much to reality, given violent crime rates in the US, despite all the madmen with automatic weapons, were lower in 2012 than they were at any point since 1970. Hentai will probably be classified as porn rather than art, and since it's a heavy handed attempt to produce social change, it probably won't get by on the argument that it isn't real. (Despite the fact that a lot of cartoons from the 40s or earlier are more brutal and alarming than anything I've seen acted live that predates The Matrix.)

[lj]

It seems to me that this is another case of well-intentioned action having totally unforseen consequences - well, unforseen for the politicians promoting them.

No, rape should not be the subject of entertainment, but there are a lot of people who enjoy rough sex, and it would be very difficult to legislate on what counts as rough sex, based purely on what appears to be happening. Bear in mind that BDSM "play" is broadly illegal in the UK - when I am on the wrong end of a cane and blood is drawn, My Lady is technically guilty of assault, and it makes absolutely no difference if I clearly state under oath that I consented to it, because in the UK you can't consent to your own assault. However. unless I choose to make a formal complaint about that "assault" it is very, very unlikely anything would occur, as "the law" is simply not interested in our sex lives or how we choose to have a D/s relationship.

The problem with the proposed legislation on web searches is that it would be extremely difficult to differentiate between perfectly legitimate searches and those intent on finding extreme porn or paedophile content. The newspaper today was blithely talking about 100,000 search terms that would be banned. I'm not sure the average person even knows 100,000 words, so that will limit the use of the internet quite a lot!!!

[bound_jenny]

It seems to me that this is another case of well-intentioned action having totally unforseen consequences

Big, sweeping actions seldom achieve substantial results. For example, one of the mayoral candidates in the recent municipal elections in Montreal wanted to build a tramway system for the city. It would probably cost billions, disrupt downtown traffic for years and drive merchants away or into insolvency during construction, and in the end, would carry very few people, because a streetcar carries very few people at a time; it's not an efficient mass transit system. But it looks so damn good! Appearances are better for politicians than things that actually work.

It's the same case with these anti-porn laws. They are usually grand, sweeping affairs with lots of "measures" and "controls", but have little impact because the problem they are seeking to cure is much larger than any one jurisdiction can handle. Or multiple jurisdictions.

Now, what about the recent spate of video games glorifying criminal activities (i.e. Grand Theft Auto series and their ilk)? The latest incarnation of GTA has some pretty despicable things for the player to do in order to be rewarded with a higher status - beating a woman to death in one case, raping and killing a prostitute in another. We're not talking about porn here, this is mainstream entertainment!!!

That is a much more legitimate target, and eliminating such things from mainstream entertainment would contribute much more to changing attitudes toward rape and violence. We should stop depicting such despicable acts as "cool" and rewarding. That would go a lot farther than some Quixotic attempt to protect us from porn.

Jenny.

[Tenderfoot88]

Now, what about the recent spate of video games glorifying criminal activities (i.e. Grand Theft Auto series and their ilk)? The latest incarnation of GTA has some pretty despicable things for the player to do in order to be rewarded with a higher status - beating a woman to death in one case, raping and killing a prostitute in another. We're not talking about porn here, this is mainstream entertainment!!!

That is a much more legitimate target....

Except it's not. Take a look at the violent crime statistics on Wikipedia (typically American-centric, but the numbers hold true up here as well)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

Note that, aside from some minor blips, "Violent Crime" goes up at a fairly steady and rather alarming rate from 1960 all the way to the 1980s, where it wobbles a bit, before breaking the 700 mark to pieces in the early to mid 1990s, peaking in 1991. After that point, it drops down and falls back to somewhere between 1970 and 1971 levels of violent crime. This actually corresponds with the development of video games. (Does that mean there's a causal relationship? No.) It's possible that video games provide for us a safe outlet for our aggression - If I want to go kill someone, I can load up a first person shooter and go on a killing spree. Satisfy the aggressive urge, and move on.

If you're looking at violence against women, going by the forcible rape column, we're down to the gap between 1967 and 1968 (and have been for 3 years)

Before you ask about the school shootings and such, there's a lot more going on there than just violent video games. You have mentally ill people who either have trouble differentiating the events of a video game with real events, or are ostracized at school and bullied to the point of lashing out. Then, since the Americans have the right to the forelimbs of large dangerous omnivores...oh wait, they mean guns, don't they...they can acquire combat grade weaponry without much difficulty. Angry kid wanting to lash out, plus tool designed to kill lots of people very effectively....there's a big problem there.

That said, I'll agree that GTA is probably crossing the line of simple decency. Rockstar (the developers of that series) doesn't seem to like that line, or perhaps just likes to cross it.

[bound_jenny]

GTA is probably crossing the line of simple decency

Probably? Most certainly. GTA for me stands for Gang Training Academy. It turns violence and criminality into a game. One gets rewarded for despicable behavior such as murder, rape, torture,and other assorted niceties. Behavioral modification through reinforcement, as the psych people would put it. An entire generation is being brainwashed into believing that this type of conduct is cool and acceptable.

And people are surprised when it's discovered that other violent media, such as rape and snuff porn, are being sought after? How can anyone with any human decency and compassion go for this kind of horror?

If one can change culture through garbage such as GTA and its ilk, how about changing that culture for the better, by eliminating those things that reinforce despicable behavior and promoting compassion, decency and nobility using the same reinforcement technique? It used to be that people with such high standards were revered and admired. More and more, they are being mocked. Remember Dan Quayle's (former Republican US VP candidate) comment about being in favor of family values? He was widely ridiculed by the Democrats and the media. And that was a long time ago. Things have only become worse since then.

Sure, sure, we like to pat ourselves on the back and say that we're decent folk and believe in compassion and decency. But it ends there. Very few take action to actually change what's going on around them. It's like a lot of people who go to church - they are very religious until they leave the building and get into the parking lot.

Politicians are opportunists (to be polite about it). They will do whatever it takes on some issues to get a vote. And stay silent on others to get votes. They will even compromise their own values to get a vote. They will introduce grand, sweeping measures to protect us from violent porn, but on the other hand will completely ignore the glorification of violence and cruelty in mainstream entertainment.

You can call it a rose, but it still reeks of hypocrisy. The weeds need to be excised down to the roots, but all these wimpy politicians do is mow the lawn.

Jenny.

Edit: I am fully aware that I'm exposing myself to a crapload of flak for taking on the source of endless hours of entertainment in dark basements. For me there's no difference between violent porn (rape, snuff) and violent video games. One can argue that the games are not depicting real people, but still, it's real people playing them and being conditioned by them. I'm not just concerned by the immediate effects, but on the consequences way down the road. Blame it on life experience.

[Tenderfoot88]

Again, take a look at the statistics. Apparently the National Post recently put the Canadian stats in convenient graph form, rather than referring back to that wikipedia table. Here it is: http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/07/25 ... -offences/

It also has a Scribd document published by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics that's worth a look.

Intensely violent video games have been around for well over a decade now (GTA1, Doom, and other such progenitors of violent gaming are all from the mid nineties). If you buy into the concept that young people are playing these games, learning to accept violence as normal, and are becoming criminals as a result, we'd have seen the leading edge of that surge in crime by now. What do we see? Well, according to the statistical analysis (rather than all this emotional charged subjective stuff), we see crime rates dropping almost across the board in both Canada and the US. (Canada's violent crime rates aren't dropping the way the US is, but we never got that high in the first place.) That CCJS paper also describes the severity of crimes being committed as being noticeably reduced over the past decade or so.

And according to an industry report (basically announcing to developers what the current demographics are like), the average age of gamers is 35 - well beyond the point where you could possibly argue people's personalities are that malleable. (The CIA ran brainwashing tests on the American public using LSD and a few other psychotropic drugs and even with that kind of help, the project failed. I think the government actually declassified those records at some point, too.)

What's even worse is the people who single out gaming rather than targeting violence in media in general. The Song of Ice and Fire books are pretty intense, but there's a lot of scenes HBO added to their Game of Thrones series that serve absolutely no purpose. One scene in season 2 involves Joffrey, already characterized as an evil sadistic little shit, having been given a couple of whores by Tyrion (in the books, Tyrion and his merc friend discuss the idea, and decide it's not such a good idea), has one go at the other with a mace. The only possible reason for that scene to be there is to establish Joffrey as an evil, sadistic, abusive bastard, but we already know this. So it's just....what's the word for gratuitous where it's not actually gratifying for anybody?

Oh, and in the 50s, there was the exact same outcry about comic books. Somehow that generation has managed to inherit the nuclear button and not destroy the world. Funny how hysteria about new things keeps cropping up in the exact same tone. (To use an older example of recurrent hysteria, the adoption of both locomotives during the industrial revolution and the adoption of the automobile several hundred years later both claimed that they were hazardous because young women would see the oncoming, extremely fast metal thing, shriek, faint in its path, and thus get run over.)

Personally, I think violence in fiction, regardless of the medium, is vital to society. Since I'm not a world famous author, and I know of an essay written by someone who is on this exact topic, I'll just provide a link to Mr. Stephen King's "Why We Crave Horror Movies." http://hacknslashmonthly.blogspot.ca/20 ... ovies.html (Horror movies are just the flavor that King responds to - for my parents, it's crime shows) If it's too long, the gist of it is we all have something dark inside, and fiction can satisfy it in safe, controlled doses, rather than building up until we lash out at something in real life where there are consequences.

All that said, do I think children should be playing Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty? No. But they're rated M by the ESRB (or PEGI 18+ for European games). Should children be taken to see R rated movies? No. (Well, unless it's a particularly exceptional child (as in, able to understand the message) and it's a movie like Schindler's List rather than Fight Club. (I think my Social Studies 11 class watched Schindler's List in high school, and some of the kids were laughing and cheering the scene where Amon Goeth was picking off Jewish workers in his camp for taking a second to catch their breath, etc from his balcony. The teacher was not impressed.) The rating systems are there for a reason - they're there to inform you what kind of content you would expect. Heck, the ESRB does a better job than the guys who do the movies - a movie can be rated R for dozens of reasons - the ESRB will list each criterion the game meets for being rated T or M or whatever.

And, by the way, Behavioral modification through positive reinforcement can only tweak behavior for established minds (which is the intended target of GTA - Rockstar doesn't market to kids, largely because they know how much shit they'd be in if they did). The only cases where I really see it producing behavior that is actually unnatural is in pet training. People's minds are complex enough to know the difference between the game world and the real world. (If we ever developed Matrix-esque virtual reality systems, we'd probably want to take a good hard look at what we're doing, but the difference between pixels on a screen and living breathing people is apparent to the vast majority of us.

(Note that in every single one of these mass shooting cases, the investigation invariably uncovers significant mental instability. When a person is in that state, they can latch on to a fantasy regardless of whether it's a video game, a movie, a book, or a random thought in their head that just won't go away. It's a failure of the mental health system. (Personally, I blame the lack of residential care - a lot of the homeless folks I met in Vancouver could have benefitted greatly from that kind of help (even if it was just a decent bed and some help with grooming). The problem with that is the political backlash of historical abuse of patients in such facilities is still too strong.))

The problem is when you cross the line from fictional entertainment to live entertainment. Which is exactly what this law is intended to address. By purchasing footage of rape, you are providing a financial incentive for the rapist to rape more people. (And by the way, this isn't new behavior - I've heard some stories from some family members who attended the less pleasant schools of their towns, involving the entire school turning out to watch the popular jock beat down some poor bastard for some imagined slight - even one incident where someone handed said tormenter a heavy chain to use as a whip. So there's a lot of people drawn to the idea of witnessing extreme violence. Fortunately, in this specific case, someone had wised up earlier on and called the cops, who showed up in time to prevent the chain actually being used.)

I must admit that I'm too young to remember Dan Quayle (I barely even remember Cheney, and I actually did care about world politics at that point), so I can't comment on the specifics. But I find it rather hypocritical for a man supporting the republican party to talk about family values or the like. I might be poisoned on the Republican party by the likes of GW Bush, John McCain and the gaggle of twits they had competing for the right to lose to Obama last year, but the Republican party only seems to value having an army big enough to conquer the world at a moment's notice, and figuring out how to get as much money as possible compiled in as few bank accounts as possible. These are the people who still harp about abortion being a bad thing and spout that wonderful little myth about women having some mystical ability to reject a pregnancy caused by rape. (That last bit, fortunately, is finally starting to fall by the wayside, but I'm pretty sure I hear it every 4 years the GOP spins up its campaign of madness.)

As for actually taking action - stepping up and doing something about something...if you mean greater causes, a lot of that is a matter of opportunity. I can't build houses for the poor and give them away, for instance, but I can volunteer to help do so. And so, I do. If you mean an incident where you have the opportunity to stop something from happening, like a mugging on the same bus you're on, that kind of response comes from a part of our brains that most of us aren't familiar with - we can't say for sure what we'd do in the heat of the moment until we've been there. And that brings us back to the caveman survivalist mentality. Altruism does have a degree of survival value, but when it's for some random person you don't know, it's an awfully big step to take. Part of military training is about getting used to the fight or flight mindset, and learning to control it so you can still do your job in a combat zone where every instinct is telling you to just run for the hills.

[lj]

I don't have time to read all of the excellent points above (work calls ) but if we take Tenderfoot's exposition of the statistics relating actual violent crime against the time-line of the proliferation of violent video games, that broadly the two are unrelated, then surely the same applies, in reality, to "extreme sexual violence" (a.k.a. BDSM ) porn.

In which case, trying to ban it is actually pointless.

The problem is there will always be anecdotal evidence pointing the other way - this morning I read in the newspaper of a 12 year old boy acting out violent sexual attacks seen on a porn site, on an 8-year-old girl. And of course this is better "news" and supports the politicians who are, as usual, knee-jerking their way towards an election.