It’s fair to say that porn – at least certain boring by-the-book types of it – is unfairly dictating a lot of young people’s sex lives. But Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd has warned that extreme porn can also ‘inspire’ extreme violence.
Citing the case of Jamie Reynolds, a 23-year-old who killed Georgia Williams, 17, in Shropshire in May 2013, Lord Thomas told a government select committee that the case left him ‘in no doubt at all that the peddling of pornography on the internet had a dramatic effect on the individual. I cannot believe that someone would have thought through how to do something without having read it.’
He continued, reports The Times, ‘What is available to download and to see is simply horrific and it played a real part in the way in which this particular murder was carried out.’
What’s extra interesting is that we’ve never quite heard the details of this case, because there was a press restriction on reporting it. The select committee seemed to be trying to work out whether filming in court should be introduced.
While Lord Thomas is against it, it seems, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, who is president of the Supreme Court, was keen. He said he found the filming of the Oscar Pistorius trial impressive.
All this said and done, it’s kind of hard to trust this Lord’s opinions on the modern proliferation of violent pornography. First of all, if you knew the right place to find it, violent porn has been available for aeons. Secondly, Lord Thomas’s colleagues are showing up just how little some Lords know about the modern world.
Formert defence secretary Lord King, told the government in a hearing about plans to increase surveillance of citizens in a bid to protect the country from terrorism, ‘We have Facebook and Twitter. Somebody tried to explain WhatsApp to me; somebody else tried to explain Snapchat. I do not know about them, but it is absolutely clear that the terrorists and jihadists do.’
…We’ll leave you to think about that one.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.