A Sunderland man has admitted possession of a short video clip of male genital mutilation on his mobile phone. He was warned that he could have faced a jail sentence had he forwarded the image along to anyone else. The clip was sent to him by a friend. This is another case of an individual not having a single previous conviction nor apparently posing any threat to the public. He did not even deliberately seek out the obscene image which apparently had been sent around his neighbourhood via mobile phone. Yet now he receives a criminal record (which could harm his employment or social prospects in the future) and a community penalty. It is unclear who benefits from the costs of prosecuting and punishing this man. This case also has nothing to do with the original intent of the legislation, which was to prevent harm to women.
From a legal perspective, a possible defence may have been missed. It seems highly unlikely that the defendant was possessing the video for his personal gratification (it had been sent to him as a kind of shock video rather than for sexual arousal). It is also possible that the image itself was produced for shock rather than for arousal (this would depend on the context of its production and trasmission as well as if there were any erotic elements within the video itself). ‘Extreme porn’ is not defined in law merely as a set of depicted acts; those acts must be depicted in a way designed to be pornographic, i.e. primarily for sexual arousal. It would be unfortunate if this possible defence was not pursued, as an otherwise law abiding citizen may have been spared a criminal record. It is difficult to establish whether this defence may have been appropriate from the newspaper report alone.
By contrast, other recent cases of extreme porn convictions (here, here and here) all seem superfluous as the defendants have all been charged with rather more serious illegal acts. This seems to underlie the fact that the ban on ‘extreme porn’ is unnecessary: it is a charge that can be tagged on to people already facing much more serious allegations (that should be where police concentrate their efforts), or a charge used to trip up unfortunate law abiding citizens who do not actually need to face criminal charges at all.