‘Criminalising Extreme Pornography: Five Years On’ – Dustin and Elvines on Ending Simulations of Rape, Incest and Childhood Sexual Abuse in/as Pornography

Holly Dustin is Director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition and Fiona Elvines is the Operations Coordinator of Rape Crisis South London.

The following slides were presented by Holly and Fiona at the ‘Criminalising Extreme Pornography: Five Years On‘ seminar in Durham University on the 8th May 2013. For further information about the End Violence Against Women Coalition’s campaign to prevent violence against women and girls, read their report ‘Deeds or Words?’ released yesterday, and their letter to the Prime Minister urging him to take action.

‘Criminalising Extreme Pornography: Five Years On’ – Antonsdóttir on Legislating against Violent P_rn: A View from Iceland

Hildur Fjóla Antonsdóttir is a human rights and gender expert at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Iceland.

Iceland has recently proposed changing its laws on pornography. The Committee on Criminal Legislation at the Ministry of the Interior in Iceland is preparing a Bill with the aim of narrowing the legal definition of pornography; and an additional committee is charged with exploring how the law can be implemented, especially in relation to on-line material.

Before the 90s, pornography in Iceland had been in the form of a few imported magazines, like Hustler and Playboy, as well as behind-the-counter videotapes in specific video rental stores. Although prostitution existed, there has never been a tradition of street-prostitution in Iceland or specific neighbourhoods where prostitution was available. In addition, strip-clubs did not exist in Iceland prior to the mid-90s. Pornography was, and is, illegal – Act 210 in the Penal Code stipulates that it is illegal to publish, import, sell, hand out, or distribute pornographic material, or to hold a public lecture or play which is similarly “immoral”. Prostitution, as a main occupation, was illegal according to the Penal Code, and it was illegal to make money off prostitution as a third party (pimping). There was, however, no specific legislation addressing the running of strip-clubs.

‘Criminalising Extreme Pornography: Five Years On’ – Dymock on The question of regulating pornography: is criminalisation the answer?

Alex Dymock is a PhD candidate at the University of Reading. Her thesis is entitled: ‘Abject Intimacies: Disgust, Sexuality and UK Law’. Alex tweets at @lexingtondymock

Five years since the extreme pornography provisions were passed as law, Durham Law School invited me to give a position paper on the provisions, assessing their effectiveness and suggesting ways in which I would like to see the law reformed.  The following weekend, the new CPS guidelines on the application of the law – formerly taken down in the aftermath of Simon Walsh’s acquittal – were released, which give the appearance of attempting to take a number of concerns about its previous interpretation into account.  While these new guidelines do seem to tighten up definitions of ‘likelihood of risk of harm’, so as to exclude depictions of consensual sadomasochism as far as possible, my own position on the current law is that it should be entirely abolished.  I defended this position on two grounds.

‘Criminalising Extreme Pornography: Five Years On’ – McGlynn and Rackley on The Extreme Pornography Provisions: A Misunderstood and Misused Law

Erika Rackley and Clare McGlynn (Durham University) have written widely on extreme pornography. You can read more about their research here and here.

In May 2008, following a 3 year period of extensive consultation and against a backdrop of significant and predominantly critical public debate, a new offence criminalising the possession of extreme pornography received its Royal Assent. The Government’s purpose in introducing the new law was to address an ‘increasing public concern’ about the availability of extreme pornography particularly that produced outside the UK and distributed via the internet which lay beyond the reach of the Obscene Publications Act 1959. It did so by shifting the focus from the producers to consumers – targeting the users of pornographic material by enabling prosecutions to be brought, for the first time, against anyone downloading, and therefore generating the demand for, such material.

‘Criminalising Extreme Pornography: Five Years On’ – Introduction to the Blog Carnival and a Storify by Chris Ashford

Welcome to Inherently Human’s Blog Carnival, ‘Criminalising Extreme Pornography: Five Years On’.

This Blog Carnival follows from the ‘Criminalising Extreme Pornography: Five Years On’ seminar which took place on 8^th May 2013 at Durham University, marking five years since the passage of legislation criminalising the possession of extreme pornography. The seminar brought together academics, activists, policy-makers and other regulatory authorities to evaluate the success or failure of the legislation and to ask what, if any, reforms are necessary to secure progress toward this objective. Delegates were encouraged to tweet using the hashtag #EP5

Cathleen Ní Houlihan and the protection of Ireland’s femininity

Aoife O’Donoghue is a lecturer at Durham Law School. This post was originally published at Human Rights in Ireland and is reproduced here with permission and thanks.

In the years preceding independence, the vision of Ireland as a women in need of protection became a standard of nationalism. Genderised Ireland has roots in Róisín Dubh and the Earl of Tyrone’s attempts to stay off the Tudor expansion in Ireland. Directly linking the Earl’s resistance to his daughter’s woes, standing in for a forsaken Ireland, the image of a women as Ireland needing male intervention to fully substantiate both her rights as a sovereign power but also to fully embrace her Irishness, as opposed to any foreign interpretations of femininity, became an entrenched trope of nationalism. This was replicated by Yeats and Gregory in the play Cathleen Ní Houlihan. In this play, Maud Gonne, as elderly mother Ireland, is only revived as young and, importantly, beautiful, upon the sacrifice of young men to regain her freedom to be distinctly Irish. Thus, Ireland becomes a women who, while personifying the very character of Irishness, also requires others, always men, to protect, vindicate and guard her from outside influences and interference. Cullingford has described the depiction of Ireland as a women as neither natural nor archetypal but so common as to be ‘rhetorically invisible.’ Further, she argues that Ireland as women has been so effective  that it is entrenched in the idea of women in stereotypical roles invariably linked to nature that is to be possessed and cultivated to its utmost by men, becoming a settled trope of Irish culture. This has created a state structure and culture in Ireland where men occupy the political role of fighting and vindicating rights on Ireland’s, and as such, women’s behalf.

Abortion, Unease and Citizenship in Ireland

Máiréad Enright is a lecturer at Kent Law School and is completing a PhD at University College Cork which examines the legal treatment of questions in Muslim divorce practice in the UK and the United States from the perspective of a multiculturalist feminism.

A great deal has been written about the recent developments in Irish abortion law. Most readers will know the basics. The Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, as interpreted in a case famously known as X, provides that a pregnancy may only legally be terminated in Ireland if: (i) there is a risk to life (as opposed to the health) of the pregnant woman; and (ii) as a matter of probability, that risk to life can only be averted by termination of the pregnancy.  In all other events, Irish women may and do avail of their constitutional right to travel, and most often seek abortions in the UK, often at significant personal cost, or use medication purchased online. (Although the purpose of the Amendment is to ‘balance’ the rights to life of the pregnant woman and the foetus, women who are carrying foetuses which are not medically viable are habitually denied abortions in Ireland, even though the state itself argued in D v. Ireland before the European Court of Human Rights that such a foetus does not necessarily enjoy Eighth Amendment rights.) In the past year, three difficulties with the constitutional regime (always a matter of unofficial knowledge) have emerged into public view.