9 - The restriction of publications

Summary

The balance of our evidence

9.1 The evidence put to us showed a remarkable balance of opinion in favour of the idea that the principal way of controlling pornography should be to restrict its availability. A large proportion of the people who wrote to us emphasised that there is a public nuisance as things are, and they asked for controls which would ensure that those who did not want to see pornography were not forced to do so. Many of the organisations who submitted memoranda to us took the same view, and proposals of this kind constantly came up in our discussions with witnesses.

9.2 In a sense, there was virtual unanimity among our witnesses that something should be done about what was seen as a public nuisance. However, the attitude of witnesses varied enormously, from extreme libertarians like the National Campaign for the Reform of the Obscene Publications Acts who were only reluctantly prepared to accept that there should be restrictions on public displays, to groups who wanted the strongest possible measures to suppress pornography but who, like the Nationwide Festival of Light, wanted these supplemented by a rigorous control of offensive displays in public places. What we found remarkable was that between these strongly opposed groups there was a very broad consensus that the main objective of the law should be to protect members of the public from the nuisance of offensive material in places to which normal life happens to take them. In many of our discussions with witnesses, from the Law Society to the Catholic Social Welfare Commission and from the Greater London Council to the Free Church Federal Council, we were struck by their readiness to agree with one another that the right way to deal with a lot of explicit sexual material at least, was to confine it to those who wanted it and prevent its offending everyone else.