Obscenity Laws

Obscenity Laws, legal restrictions on the publication of words or other material on the grounds that they are too indecent to be acceptable to society. Some countries have stricter obscenity laws than others: Ireland and Italy, for example. In English law it is a criminal offence to publish obscene articles for financial gain, and obscenity is determined by reference to those who are likely to come into contact with the publication. The publication must be likely to “deprave and corrupt” such people. It is no defence that the article will only be seen by people who are already depraved and corrupted.

The law today is not limited to matters of sexual morality: it extends to publications dealing with violence and drug-taking. It is widely drawn and what exactly constitutes depravity may depend upon the approach taken by the trial court.

The author's intention is irrelevant: the offence depends exclusively on the effect the publication has on its readership, in the opinion of the jury. However, an article is judged as a whole, so part of a novel, for example, which might be considered obscene if taken alone, could escape the charge if it were included for literary reasons.

The typical obscenity offence concerns words or still pictures, but films and video recordings are also covered; however, prosecutions may only be brought for showing obscene commercial films when the highest level of prosecution gives consent.

It is a defence against the charge of obscene publication to show that the article was published for the public good because it is science, literature, art, or learning, and expert evidence may be brought to demonstrate the case.

Other offences that may be committed include outraging public decency, a common law offence. For this to be proved, the article must provoke public outrage and disgust, but it need not deprave and corrupt. This offence was used amid considerable controversy in 1991 to make illegal a display of earrings made of freeze-dried human foetuses in a London art gallery. This was seen as a reversal of the increasing tendency for the laws to be used largely against only hard-core pornography, mainly the case since 1960, when a prosecution of Penguin Books for the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence was unsuccessful. It was then thought that artistic works would be immune from censorship of this kind.

The Protection of Children Act 1978 makes it a criminal offence for a person to take, copy, or distribute indecent photographs of children.