Longford report on pornography

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33027, 21 September 1972, Page 15

Longford report on pornography

(X ZPA Reuter—Copyright/ LONDON, Sept. 20. After a year of investigating pornography, a committee of prominent Britons today urges new laws to push back the permissive society and to send more pornographers to gaoL The committee’s muchheralded, 200.000-word report lashes out at an obscenity boom which, it says, has already created the first •’blue fihn” millionaire, and ha. flooded the country with "We are not prudes or k'lljoys,” savs a conclusion s gned by the 52 members of* the privately-sponsored c mmittee. “but we have been made aware of influences at work in our society which endanger the very canacity for real joy by denigrating and devaluing human persons.” The 52 include four bishops, five lawyers, several writers, professors, social workers, a leading disc jockey, and a pop singer.

They laboured under the chairmanship of Lord Longford, aged 66, the mild-man-nered reformer who served several times as a middlerank Labour Government Minister.

He made headlines last year when, during the committee’s researches, he was photographed recoiling in distaste from the live sex shows of Copenhagen. The core of the committee’s finding is that a change is necessary in Britain’s present legal definition of obscenity, which says that an article must be judged liable to deprave and corrupt before it can be ruled obscene. The Longford definition of obscenity would be “to outrage contemporary standards of decency or humanity accepted by the public at large.” This new guideline, the committee hopes, would facilitate prosecution of much literature now tolerated by the police. The new law would abolish the defence that even though an article is obscene, it should still be published “for the public good” on grounds, of artistic or other merit. 1

The committee recommends that the obscenity laws should be extended to cover films, television, radio, and theatre, which are now controlled by separate conventions.

The committee’s proposed draft bill would create two new offences.

One of these is the public exhibition, or distribution, of indecent material —a matter now lumped together under other parts of the obscenity laws; the maximum penalty would be six months in gaol. The other new offence would be exploiting actors, models, and others to engage in obscene performances—a measure applicable to live sex shows, which, so far, have not appeared widely in Britain; the maximum penalty in this case would be three years in prison.

The draft bill recommends that penalties for other forms of obscenity should remain at their present maximum level of three years, but that fines in the lower courts should be raised from £4OO to £5OO.

The report says that the draft has been worded so as

to include matters connected with drugs and violence within the definition of obscenity. Some of the harshest criticism is meted out to British television in the report of a sub-committee headed by the author and critic, Malcolm Muggeridge. This says: “Television has created a fantasy world . . . where no moral order obtains . . .

by abandoning traditional morality, our society is set on a gadarene course towards self-destruction.”

Other parts of the report admit that it is difficult to prove a connection between pornography and anti-social behaviour like wife-swapping, but it says that pornography clearly must have some effect.

It cites a few cases'?^of a youth, aged 17, who watched a sex film, and then violated a girl of five; of a married man of 35 who took up with a girl of 11 after reading pornography. Lord Longford says that the degree of nudity in a picture does not necessarily reflect its obscenity: his report gives the test of obscenity as “anything that exploits and dehumanises sex.”

Even some normal people, the report says, can become addicted to pornography.

The works menitoned repeatedly in the report’s 520 pages include “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” the films, “Clockwork Orange” and “Straw Dogs,” and, most of all, the stage show, “Oh! Calcutta!” It was seeing “Oh! Calcutta!” in London that made Lord Longford begin his inquiry, the findings of which are in no way binding on the British Government, although Cabinet Ministers have said that they will study them. Lord Longford is the seventh earl in a line of AngloIrish Protestant aristocrats. In adult life he became converted to socialism and the Roman Catholic Church. One of his chief interests is in liberalising Britain’s penal system. The “Daily Mirror” recently commented: “A man with seven children can’t be against sex.” The report recalls how Lord Longford walked out on two live shows in Copenhagen, and adds: “The rest of the team proved to be of sterner stuff, though making no secret of their distaste -or boredom.”