Necrobabes

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Necrobabes is an Internet website hosting fantasy images of women pretending to be dead. The site is subtitled "erotic horror for adults".

Although hosted in the United States, the website has achieved notability in the United Kingdom in an attempt to criminalise possession of what the Government has termed extreme pornography.

1 Campaign
2 Content
3 Coverage
4 Legality
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Campaign

Necrobabes was cited as an example of an Internet site (along with "death by asphyxia" and "hanging bitches") which was accessed by Graham Coutts, who killed Jane Longhurst. After his murder conviction (now overturned), a campaign was made to shut down sites such as Necrobabes, and to make it a criminal offence to possess images from them. A petition promoted by Martin Salter and which gained 50,000 signatures [1] referred to Necrobabes as an example of "extreme internet sites promoting violence against women in the name of sexual gratification".

The Government consultation which followed announced that the material would include images showing "sexual interference with a human corpse" and "images of acts that appear to be life threatening", and would cover "realistic depictions" as well as actual acts. It would also cover private images which were not downloaded and had not been published.

[edit] Content

The mainstream UK media and House of Commons debates have given little attention to the content of Necrobabes. The original Government consultation did not mention Necrobabes, but claimed that depictions of necrophilia are widely available.

The site itself asserts "The material we produce is fanciful, even cartoonish in many regards; there is nothing realistic about it. Our viewers know this. Far from normalizing violence, it relegates it squarely into the realm of fantasy." It states that scenes are simulated, and that "no one was harmed during the making of our photo stories and videos". They claim that, contrary to the aforementioned petition, they do not encourage nor condone real-life violence against others.

The site states that there is no pornography on the site, and claims that it is exempt from the recordkeeping requirements of 18 U.S.C. § 2257, because there are no images of actual sexually explicit conduct. (The proposed UK law would also require images to be sexually explicit.)

The site is registered with the ICRA so that it can be blocked by Microsoft Internet Explorer's Parental Controls.

[edit] Coverage

The Early Day Motion [2] referred to it as "corrupting". The Sun referred to sites such as Necrobabes as "sick" [3].

The Guardian however suggested that the worst still from Hitchcock's Frenzy "is easily the equal of any Necrobabes gore" [4].

The site has been covered in the US media, which support that the site is entirely fantasy using consenting models [5].

[edit] Legality

Necrobabes is hosted in the United States and has been online since 1997. The UK Government has attempted without success to get the US authorities to shutdown sites such as Necrobabes [6]. Such images are legal in the US, and it has been claimed they would be hard to ban without violating the First Amendment [7].