I wasn't speculating that rapes would go unreported. I was pointing out that laws often have unintended consequences. I would be much more worried about innocent or incidental witnesses being prosecuted over-zealously or maliciously.

For instance, until recently it was illegal to make an audio recording of another person without his or her express permission. These laws were put in place to prevent criminal "wiretaps" (for purposes of blackmail and the like). Of course every parent who recorded his daughter's dance recital was also committing a felony, but since no one was ever charged for that, nobody complained.

But then the police realized that if they wanted to prevent someone from recording their illegal or embarrassing activities they could arrest the person for illegally wiretapping them. This led to a string of arrests and prosecutions for doing nothing more than documenting police brutality, incompetence or corruption. The point here is that laws have a way of being misused and some laws are easier to misuse than others. Censorship laws are in this category, so special consideration should always be given to the possible unintended consequences when such laws are considered.

Perhaps over-zealous or malicious prosecution doesn't happen in the UK, this seems a bit far-fetched to me, but maybe it's true. It certainly happens in the US.

This is something the majority of HN has absolutely no experience with, so they either a) try to relate it to the tech industry (and fail, see most of the terrible analogies in this thread), or b) reduce it to the most blackest and whitest of situations (see everyone here saying that outlawing pictures of rape is the death of free speech.)

Of course, if 1 in 6 men were victims of an attempted or completed rape, and if 9 out of 10 victims of rape were men,[0] I'm sure the conversations here would be very different.

[0]: http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assau...