How extreme is your pr0n? Depends on your lawyer

The judge too was unimpressed. Ordering the man to complete 200 hours of unpaid work, District Judge Roger Eley said: "There is no doubt that this was a revolting and perverted piece of video and there is no reasonable explanation for this being on your mobile for the time it was.

"If you had any previous convictions or you had distributed this piece of video, you would be going to prison."

So what is going on? One possibility is that these are different clips and the two successful prosecutions were indeed in respect of extreme porn. An alternative is a simple cultural mismatch.

One individual who knows this material well suggests that in fact the video is actually a viral clip called "BME Pain Olympics: Final Round". This event is one of the events that occasionally occurs at BME BBQs – events staged by Body Mod Ezine, put on to see who has the highest pain tolerance and stamina, though it is not clear whether the video is "authentic" or not.

Revolting? Probably. Pornographic? Probably not. However, the message coming through loud and clear from the UK legal system seems to be that such activity is well beyond the ken of most of the legal establishment – and if it involves genitals, it must be sexual.

Meanwhile, another possibly worrying case hits the headlines today of a Dorset dentist - David Hill from Pennington Close, West Moors - convicted on the sole charge of possessing extreme pornography depicting pain being inflicted.

Prosecutor Desmond Duffy told Bournemouth Crown Court: "He [Mr Hill] accepted that what he had downloaded was extreme in nature, acknowledging participants were likely to be experiencing severe pain and risking injury as a result."

Without sight of the material seized it is impossible to comment further. However, afficionadoes of this law will be aware that neither experiencing severe pain nor the risk of injury are specifically outlawed within the law. ®