YNOT EUROPE – Falling in line with the English Parliament’s action of May 2008, Scotland’s Parliament last week outlawed the possession of “extreme pornography.” In addition to criminalizing images that are “realistic, pornographic and of an extreme nature,” as the British law does, the Scottish law also bans representations that depict or seem to depict “rape or other non-consensual penetrative sexual activity.”

In other words, several popular erotic fantasies now are off-limits, at least on film or in pixels.

Critics castigate the law as nothing more than showy rhetoric and claim it will be ineffective for many of the same reasons the British law does not seem to have worked as well as members of parliament had hoped. According to The Register, to date British and Welsh authorities have prosecuted 50 cases, the majority of which involved bestiality, not the kind of human-on-human violence and abuse the law’s authors claimed the legislation primarily sought to address. The reason, according to The Register, is that human-on-human extremity, especially of the non-consensual type, is difficult to recognize and prove.

For that reason, the Association of Chief Police Officers has been outspoken in advising police to avoid proactive enforcement of the law, typically filing charges only as “add-ons” when presented with other offenses. When extreme-porn cases have been prosecuted alone, typically the result has been embarrassment for the crown, The Register noted in a recent analysis.

Some members of Scottish Parliament fear the law is an exercise in futility and should have been studied further before passage.

“[Cabinet Secretary Kenny MacAskill] will be aware that the measure [on extreme pornography] that exists in England and Wales is having no effect in reducing the production of genuinely violent or abusive images, but is being used just as a top-up charge in a small number of cases in which the most serious offense is rape or sexual assault, which attract a higher sentence,” MSP Patrick Harvie pointed out during discussion of the legislation. “If we end up in a similar situation with the charge being used in a similar way in Scotland, as a mere top-up, will we not have to look again at whether it serves any purpose? It would serve no purpose whatever if we were simply to reproduce a situation in Scotland which seems to be failing elsewhere.”

Organizations that represent producers of material in some of the fetish genres believe the law not only will be ineffective, but also could be downright counterproductive.

“The law [in England and Wales] does not appear to be doing what it is meant to do, but the negative side-effects are themselves extreme, with BDSM websites encouraging practitioners towards safer play being taken down over the last year and a half,” Consenting Adult Action Network Scotland Convenor Becky Dwyer told The Register. “It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this law has made the world a far less safe, more dangerous place.”