Does this extend to sending any image with intent to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation? Or does it stop with images of genitals?
The Malicious Communications Act covers sending anything else with the intent of causing "distress or anxiety".
As an aside, "intent" in UK law usually means "knows or should have known" ie you can't just say "I didn't mean to" if the average person would agree that such a communication would cause distress etc (again this is a matter for a court).
So sending a photo of a steak to a vegan would get you 5 years in prison? I'm glad I don't live in the UK and I'm glad they left the EU so their idiotic laws won't poison EU laws.
Two issues. The question is what was your intent. Proving that it was sent with the intent of causing distress or anxiety is much harder in that case. For example I don’t know a single vegan who would react with distress or anxiety to the image of a steak. That is just nonsense. They would just say “yuck”.
But if from the circumstances it is clear that that is the intent, perhaps because the vegan in question repeatedly expresses distress and the accused in question still keeps sending them then why would we not punish that? As in do you want that kind of behaviour in your society?
That was issue one. Issue two is about the 5 years. You say that as if that is the standard length of punishment a first time vegan abuser should expect. In reality this person has previously been convicted of a sexual crime and then commited infractions against multiple people. Surely these factors played a role in the lenght of prison sentence he received?
Telling a chess player that chess is a silly game with a hodge-podge of rules crudely kludged together can be described as offending. It is a bit crass but to each their own.
The kind of communication I want people to be arrested for is way beyond that level which I would describe as “offending”.
But assuming you are asking in good faith: Why do I want people arrested for intentionally sending distressing pictures? Same reason I want anyone arrested for punching someone in the face. Because I think that behaviour should not be tolerated in civilised society and I want it to happen less often.
Our definition of intent is the same, though. "Knows or reasonably should have known".
Not a lawyer, so i can’t say if you are right or not but there is a very famous US Supreme Court ruling which basically said “I know it when I see it” about obscenity. That suggest to me that perhaps the definition is not as clear cut in all cases as one would imagine (or were not as clear cut back in 1964).
Quiting from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
> The change means that anyone who sends a photo or film of a person’s genitals, for the purpose of their own sexual gratification or to cause the victim humiliation, alarm or distress may face up to two years in prison.