In law, body modification is a process whereby a person allows another to alter the physicality of their body. In the case of R v BM, the court was asked to consider whether body modification was capable of becoming a further, ad hoc, special category of injury to the person covered by the defence of consent. In such cases, such an ‘operation’ is neither carried out by a medical practitioner, nor is required to satisfy any therapeutic resolution for the ‘patient’.
In R v BM, the Court of Appeal had to rule whether a tattooist who added ‘body modifications’, and carried out such as part of his business, could use the defence of consent. He was charged with three offences under section 18 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, having removed a customer’s ear, removed a (male) customer’s nipple and carried out the division of a customer’s tongue to replicate that of a reptile.
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