Gag me with an ASBO . . . literally

Brendan O'Neill dishes the sordid details:

At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the north east of England, was remanded in custody for having "excessively noisy sex." The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her "shouting and groaning" and her "bed banging against the wall of her home." Cartwright has, quite reasonably, defended her inalienable right to be a howler: "I can't stop making noise during sex. It's unnatural to not make any noises and I don't think that I am particularly loud."

[. . .] Cartwright had previously been served with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) — a civil order that is used to control the minutiae of British people's behaviour — that forbade her from making "excessive noise during sex" anywhere in England.

That's right, going even further than Orwell's imagined authoritarian hellhole, where at least there was a wood or two where people could indulge their sexual impulses, the local authorities in Wearside made all of England a no-go zone for Cartwright's noisy shenanigans. If she wanted to howl with abandon, she would have to nip over the border to Scotland or maybe catch a ferry to France. It was because she breached the conditions of her Anti-Social Behaviour Order, the civil ruling about how much noise she can make while making love in England, that Cartwright was arrested.

Apparently, ASBOs can be issued without normal due process, "to stop anyone else from doing something that they find irritating, 'alarming,' or 'threatening'." The potential for abuse is glaring . . . and seems to be less potential and more actual.