For adults who keep BDSM and fetish images, Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 was a bad surprise. It makes possession of “extreme pornography” a crime. It did not start biting in 2008. The possession offence began in January 2009, the day after a protest held on 25 January. The drafting was vague enough that staged adult SM, and screenshots from films that were legal to shoot, could still be treated as contraband if everyone on camera had consented. To find out where the line was, the Consenting Adult Action Network (CAAN), a UK grassroots group, ran a test in June and August 2008. Activists took a dossier of images to three major police forces. None of them could say which pictures were illegal. The people who would have to enforce the line could not draw it.
That gap had a practical chill. A picture can be legal to film and sell, and still put the person who keeps it at home in legal trouble if someone later calls it extreme. The risk is not limited to “pure” SM. Impact, simulated harm, and extreme-looking aesthetics sit in the same fog. Because nobody could say which images would be caught, CAAN called a London protest on 25 January 2009, the day before the law took effect. Backlash and The Spanner Trust backed it. Peter Tatchell was there. CAAN treated the issue as a civil-liberties problem, not a niche SM complaint: a possession offence does not have to raid a dungeon to cool a scene. Collecting the pictures becomes the risk.
Section 63 was not their only target. They also opposed clauses in the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 that bar people from work with children or “vulnerable adults” if they possess “sexually explicit images depicting violence against human beings.” The government said 11.3 million people would have to register with the scheme. Other estimates put it over 14 million. Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, sexual images of 16- and 17-year-olds are treated as child pornography even though the age of consent stays 16. CAAN said it had no interest in changing the age of consent, and still called that image rule misguided and out of proportion. Plans to criminalise prostitution, and to recategorise lapdancing clubs as “sex encounter” establishments, sat on the same list. They are not pure SM statutes. They still press on the room BDSM people have to move in.
The toolkit ran from the street to a book. In October 2008 CAAN protested the extreme-porn law with Ben Westwood. The same year the London Gay Sex and Fetish Awards named them Specialists Website of the Year. In March 2010 they announced they would publish John Ozimek’s Beyond the Circle: Sexuality & Discrimination in Heteronormative Britain. Alongside Backlash, the Campaign Against Censorship, and the legacy of Operation Spanner, the network treated consensual adult fetish images as civil-liberties ground: dossier tests, a Westwood-linked protest, an award, an eve-of-law demonstration, and a longer argument in print.
