The Spanner Trust is a United Kingdom organisation whose aim is adults’ right to consensual BDSM without fearing prosecution for what they do in private. It was founded after the Operation Spanner cases. Men who took part in consensual sadomasochism were convicted even though there were no non-consenting victims. From that came the Trust’s voice on law and policy, for British kink and beyond it. If the state can treat private, consensual SM as harm, an organised community has to answer in government consultations, coalitions, and public argument.
In repeated submissions on sadomasochism, the Spanner Trust argued that mutual consent between adults should outweigh outside disgust at bruises, cuts, or the look of power exchange. If the people involved are adults and they have agreed, marks on the body should not be what makes the act illegal.
In 2005 the Trust helped set up Backlash, a group opposing plans to criminalise possession of so-called extreme pornography. The disputed law covered both consensual acts between adults and realistic images of those acts. SM pornography, and documentary-style recordings of scenes, could be reclassified as something it was a crime merely to possess.
In the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, the British government cited the Spanner case itself when it created the offence of possessing extreme pornography. The case is Brown [1994] 1 AC 212. That conviction refused to treat consensual SM as lawful private conduct. The government later used it as a reason to bring pictures of those same consensual acts inside criminal law.
