The Spanner Trust is a United Kingdom organisation set up to campaign for adults’ right to consensual BDSM without fear of prosecution. It was founded after the Operation Spanner cases, in which men who took part in consensual sadomasochistic activities were convicted even though there were no non-consenting victims. For British and international kink communities, the Trust is a legal and policy voice born from that trauma: if the state can treat private consensual SM as assault, organised resistance has to answer in consultations, coalitions, and public argument.
Campaign Work and Government Submissions
As part of its campaign, the Spanner Trust has made multiple submissions to government consultations on sadomasochistic activities—arguing that mutual adult consent should outweigh moral disgust at bruises, cuts, or power-exchange aesthetics.
Backlash and Extreme Pornography Law
In 2005 the Trust helped create Backlash, a group opposing plans to criminalise possession of so-called “extreme pornography.” The contested law covers acts between consenting adults and realistic depictions of such acts—exactly where SM pornography and documentary scene imagery can be reclassified as criminal objects to own. In the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, the British Government cited the Spanner case itself (Brown [1994] 1 AC 212) as justification for criminalising images of consensual acts inside its extreme-pornography possession regime. That citation is the bitter punchline: a conviction that refused to recognise consensual SM as lawful private conduct was later used to justify criminalising even pictures of such conduct.
