The Online Harms Bill that is making its way through Parliament was always going to be an assault of freedom of speech, but the latest proposals could, if extended from their original intent, become a tool that some could abuse in order to silence their critics. The intent of the proposals to outlaw messages that can be shown to cause ‘psychological harm’ to those who receive them or see them is primarily aimed at those men who harass women by sending them unwanted and unsolicited ‘dick pics’. At present such images may not meet the quite high legal standard of being ‘indecent’ or ‘grossly offensive’ and men who make a habit of sending dick pics that are unwanted by the recipient cannot be prosecuted because the bar to prosecution is so high.

No reasonable person would in my view support those men who send unwanted and unsolicited dick pics to women and who do so with the intent that the women who receive such images out of the blue become fearful. I can see a number of scenarios when abusive men might do such a thing such as ex partners, men who have been rejected sexually by the targets of their dick pics and those who get a sexual kick from flashing their genitalia at women. It’s right that the law should prevent men from harassing women in this way and there is legal precedent, in place for many many years for criminalising abusive men who commit acts of indecent exposure.

However, I can also see how this proposed legislation could be readily and easily abused. On the dick pics issue it would be quite possible that a couple where the woman had readily accepted dick pics from her partner as part of their normal sexual life, might use these images as a way of ‘getting back’ at her ex. The previously sent dick pics could be falsely claimed as being unsolicited and equally falsely attributed to dates after the couple split up. In such a case it could be months or even years before the falsely accused male ex-partner could be able to clear their name. As a believer in sexual equality I do not believe that men are all bad or women are all good. Some women are bad as are some men. A belief in equality also means accepting that some women lie just as some men do, some women make false claims and some men do. Whilst this proposed law might protect those women who received unsolicited dick pics who don’t want them, it could also be something that is used as a weapon by abusive women to control or harass current or former male partners.

What gives me the greatest concern about this proposal is the possibility that once the psychological harm genie is out of the bottle, that this concept gets extended into other areas. Psychological harm is a very broad and difficult to define term and also one that is very specific to the individual. Comments that one person might brush off or laugh at could be seen by another as ‘harmful’. These proposals take us into a similar area to that of ‘hate speech’ where there is a massive reliance by the legal system on the ‘perception’ of those who hear the ‘offending’ words. In other words no real solid evidence is required to show that a ‘hate speech’ offence has been committed, only that the recipient can claim a perception that they found them ‘harmful’.

Taking the psychological harms idea out of the strictly defined area of domestic abuse will cause all sorts of free speech problems. Groups like the increasingly aggressive trans rights activists could claim that gender critical feminists for example who are opposed to the cult of trans had ‘psychologically harmed’ them by their opinions. Also if extended into other areas, the ability to claim, often falsely, that comments caused ‘psychological harm’ could quite easily be abused by various racial and religious grievance mongers, people who want to hide or exempt their religious or political paths from public scrutiny and celebrities who may well do something genuinely worthy of criticism but who claim that such criticism of them causes them ‘harm’.

This is a bit of a ‘curate’s egg’ bit of legislation, good in parts. It’s right that women who are the primary victims of unsolicited and unwanted dick pics from abusive men have better legal redress than they have at present but I see that there are massive issues of how this legislation could be readily abused, even in its current proposed form. The situation for Britons right to speak freely about matters that concern them will be made even more perilous should the provisions regarding the psychological harm caused by dick pics be extended into other areas.

Addendum

There is an interesting discussion on this issue over at the left leaning Urban75 board with some lefties being quite concerned that this proposed legislation could be used to attack the left.

Also there’s background information regarding these proposals, created when this issue first started to be mooted a few months ago from the Free Speech Union.