Campaign against Pornography

The first Campaign Against Pornography (CAP) conference took place in November 1989, shortly after the launch of Off the Shelf, CAP's campaign to get W. H. Smith to stop stocking soft-porn magazines on its top shelf. The conference, entitled 'Pornography and Sexual Violence' had been planned for over a year, was massively oversubscribed and a 1990 repeat was planned. It was part of a programme of action between November 1989 and April 1990 which included a speaking tour and regional training events in February sessions for activists on winning the arguments against pornography and a national day of action on International Women's Day. The November conference took place at Nottingham Polytechnic Students Union; students were much in evidence though the Townswomen's Guild, which took part in the London press launch of Off the Shelf, was nowhere to be seen. A national women's conference, as the event was subtitled, is a rarity in itself, but CAP's conference was also unusual in that it did not invite debate about the issue. Though not confined to CAP's 700 members, the registration form stated that women attending should be opposed to pornography and want to organise against it, before they had heard the arguments. Potential dissenters were excluded from the afternoon workshops. Women with press tickets were allowed to listen to the series of papers which formed the first half of the conference. A cheer went up when it was announced over the loudspeaker that a group of women who had distributed a leaflet 'against the aims of this conference' during the lunchbreak were 'no longer with us'. The leaflet contained a feminist argument against the dangers of censorship. Despite the fact that participants were presumed to agree already, the six papers which made up the first half of the conference were not about ways to combat pornography but a rehearsal of arguments and