UK woman praying silently arrested for ‘thought crime’ amid crackdown on speech
A Birmingham woman was arrested last week for allegedly silently praying outside an abortion center after police received complaints from an onlooker.
Video footage of the incident shows authorities approach Isabel Vaughan-Spruce as she stands quietly outside the BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham. The police question Vaughan-Spruce and demand she explain her presence.
“Are you standing here as part of a protest?” asked the officer.
“No, I’m not protesting,” Vaughan-Spruce said.
“Are you praying?” the police officer asked her.
“I might be praying in my head,” she replied, at which point the officers publicly subjected the woman to a lengthy search and led her away.
At the station, reports Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Vaughan-Spruce was shown photos of herself standing outside the abortion center. She was unable to recall for the police officers at which moment she had been praying or at which moment she had been thinking mundane thoughts, such as her lunch.
“It’s abhorrently wrong that I was searched, arrested, interrogated by police and charged simply for praying in the privacy of my own mind,” said Vaughan-Spruce following her arrest. “Censorship zones purport to ban harassment, which is already illegal. Nobody should ever be subject to harassment. But what I did was the furthest thing from harmful – I was exercising my freedom of thought, my freedom of religion, inside the privacy of my own mind. Nobody should be criminalised for thinking and for praying, in a public space in the UK.”
Vaughan-Spruce's thought crime falls under the Birmingham Council’s Public Space Protection Order (PSPO) for the area, which prohibits “protesting, namely engaging in any act of approval or disapproval or attempted act of approval or disapproval, with respect to issues related to abortion services, by any means. This includes but is not limited to graphic, verbal or written means, prayer or counselling.”
PSPOs are laws set by local government councils which regulating public activity to ward off “anti-social behaviour.”
Frontline News reported last week that in the London Borough of Barnet, one can be charged with a crime for “offensive language”.
“Any person who, without reasonable excuse, behaves in a manner that causes, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm, or distress to any person(s) commits an offence,” says the memo from the Barnet Council. “Examples of such behaviour include use of offensive, threatening or abusive language.”
Other laws include bans on spitting, drinking alcohol, possessing alcohol (“or anything reasonably believed to be alcohol”), walking more than six dogs at a time and promoting music or music events. The last order prohibits the use of legal psychoactive drugs or even the possession of “drug paraphernalia,” such as certain kinds of pipes.
PSPOs are part of an evolving crackdown on speech in the UK.
In July, a decorated British war veteran was arrested for “malicious communications” after police received a complaint about one of his social media posts. The offending post showed a swastika made of rainbow flags, a commentary on the state-sponsored intimidation of citizens to embrace same-sex attraction and gender disorientation.
A bill returned to the House of Commons in November would allow UK communications regulator Ofcom to force private messaging platforms to scan users’ messages for “harmful content” which is sweepingly defined as causing “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress.” It would also allow Ofcom to end the messaging services altogether.
