Despite much fanfare, the new non-fatal strangulation law in England and Wales treats the offence less seriously than previously, not more seriously. Scotland should steer clear.
What a farce! It's not normally quite *this* silly.
Being philosophically/politically inclined the way I am, as a general matter opposed to punishment and to criminalisation of deviant sexual behaviour, my instinct upon hearing this was afoot was in the "the filth can pry my torture porn from my cold, dead hands" camp. But once I started thinking about it a bit, it did become clear there's a terribly nasty trade-off here due the role of strangulation in intimate partner violence.
I am no longer an absolutist about this: I admit there is good in allowing *some amount* of the criminalisation of consensual sexual behaviour in order to counter *some amount* of abuse of consent defences. I tried coming up with a perfectly well-defined criminal law that requires absolutely no trade-offs and cannot be abused ever (plus the ideal political system and objectively correct culture to boot!) by getting in facebook arguments ten hours per day for five years. I'll admit that's probably not the optimal way to crack the problem, but now I'm convinced it can't even be done in theory, so land back in this squishy world.
But hey, we can throw all that out the window, because the new law is just super-dumb in the normal campaign-based law way. I can safely be opposed to it on the grounds of it being obviously stupid, and so mostly serving to make things dumber and kludgier. I don't think the actual effects of making the most severe GBH-level offence less severely punishable will almost ever come up (and surely people could just charge under the existing GBH law if they really wanted >5y anyway), so it's just all kludgy dumb downside.
Where's Cristopher Chope when you need him? Isn't he meant to be the guy we wheel out to take the flak for opposing this sort of crap?
Excellent. As ever, God is in the detail! Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I do wonder if there could be some kind of meta campaign group whose function is to call out and try to block bad campaign group legislation ideas that make problems worse (?!), though admittedly such an enterprise would be very unpopular
What a farce! It's not normally quite *this* silly.
Being philosophically/politically inclined the way I am, as a general matter opposed to punishment and to criminalisation of deviant sexual behaviour, my instinct upon hearing this was afoot was in the "the filth can pry my torture porn from my cold, dead hands" camp. But once I started thinking about it a bit, it did become clear there's a terribly nasty trade-off here due the role of strangulation in intimate partner violence.
I am no longer an absolutist about this: I admit there is good in allowing *some amount* of the criminalisation of consensual sexual behaviour in order to counter *some amount* of abuse of consent defences. I tried coming up with a perfectly well-defined criminal law that requires absolutely no trade-offs and cannot be abused ever (plus the ideal political system and objectively correct culture to boot!) by getting in facebook arguments ten hours per day for five years. I'll admit that's probably not the optimal way to crack the problem, but now I'm convinced it can't even be done in theory, so land back in this squishy world.
But hey, we can throw all that out the window, because the new law is just super-dumb in the normal campaign-based law way. I can safely be opposed to it on the grounds of it being obviously stupid, and so mostly serving to make things dumber and kludgier. I don't think the actual effects of making the most severe GBH-level offence less severely punishable will almost ever come up (and surely people could just charge under the existing GBH law if they really wanted >5y anyway), so it's just all kludgy dumb downside.
Where's Cristopher Chope when you need him? Isn't he meant to be the guy we wheel out to take the flak for opposing this sort of crap?
Excellent. As ever, God is in the detail! Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I do wonder if there could be some kind of meta campaign group whose function is to call out and try to block bad campaign group legislation ideas that make problems worse (?!), though admittedly such an enterprise would be very unpopular
I already want to donate to this org :p