Last week, lawmakers voted to ban semen-defaced images, screenshotting intimate videos and the creation or possession of porn depicting incest.
Now, these changes have been taken one step further, with a new amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill set to make portrayals of sex between step-family illegal too.
In a debate in the House of Lords as part of the bill’s report stage, Baroness Bertin said she was ‘mystified’ why step-incest hadn’t already been included, adding: ‘In 2024, 4.1 billion videos viewed on Pornhub featured incest-related scenarios.’
The Conservative life peer proposed for the legislation’s wording to be changed from ‘related’ to ‘as defined in section 27 (family relationships) of the Sexual Offences Act 2003’ — and the amendment passed by a whisker, with 144 votes for and 143 against.
‘Step-relations are the most likely relationships in which child sexual abuse takes place,’ commented Lady Bertin.
‘In fact, in the UK around half of all sexual abuse cases against children are perpetrated by a step-parent. Yet this type of pornography allows porn companies to profit from content that depicts something that is utterly illegal in the UK.’
While this is true in most cases, the Sexual Offences Act does have some exemptions: if two people are solely related by marriage, it’s considered incest only if ‘they live or have lived in the same household’, or one person ‘is or has been regularly involved in caring for, training, supervising or being in sole charge of’ the other.
Baroness Levitt warned that this addition has the potential to ‘criminalise sexual relationships that are lawful between adults in real life’, as some step-relative relationships ‘are classified’ within offline regulation.
‘In addition, this change proposed… would significantly increase the complexity of the offence’, the barrister continued. ‘It would be challenging for the police and the CPS to determine and ultimately prosecute.’
Do you think that the new amendment to ban step-family depictions in pornography is a good idea?
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Yes, I believe it aligns with laws on family relationships.
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No, I think it's overcomplicated and hard to enforce.
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I am not sure, it depends on implementation details.
This Is Not Right
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With the help of our partners at Women’s Aid, This Is Not Right aims to shine a light on the sheer scale of this national emergency.
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Mark Jones, online safety expert and partner at law firm Payne Hicks Beach, agrees, saying it creates an ‘complex’ issue for authorities, as the definition included in the Sexual Offences Act ‘is not itself straightforward’.
‘In reviewing potentially offending material, the police will now have to consider, for example, whether pornographic material depicting step-siblings concerns persons who live or have lived together, as well as whether one participant is or has regularly been involved in caring for the other,’ he tells Metro.
And since ‘such context is unlikely to be expressly alluded to in content of this nature’, enforcement could become something of a minefield.
Beyond this, Mark claims ‘perhaps the most fundamental problem’ with the legislation is that viewers will do what they did to circumvent the Online Safety Act’s age restrictions: use tools like VPNs to access content that’s illegal in this jurisdiction, but legal in others.
‘We see time and time again, that technology outpaces legislation,’ he adds.
It’s not inconceivable to assume porn producers may look for ways around this rule too — and if a video featuring simulated step-incest has a caveat that makes it clear the characters have never lived together, where does that leave law enforcement?
While the final practicalities haven’t yet been decided (the Government is expected to set out its position when the bill returns to the Commons in April), Mark argues that its ‘admirable aim must be balanced against practical considerations regarding the reality of enforcing laws against the production or possession of such content.’
He continues: ‘In so far as possible, legislators should aim for robust simplicity, so as to make offences as straightforward as possible for an already stressed police force and CPS, to prosecute.’
Could more stringent porn restrictions follow?
One word mentioned repeatedly in the House of Lords debate on the amendment was ‘parity’, with Lady Bertin saying the goal is a ‘level playing field’ between what’s allowed online and in real life.
As such, another amendment to ban pornographic content where a an performer ‘appears to be or is implied to be’ a child — regardless of their actual age — was tabled.
Lady Bertin told peers that existing laws prohibiting real or digitally-modified indecent images of under-18s were brought in on the basis this ‘normalises and promotes child sexual abuse’.
On the contrary, mainstream porn sites show ‘an extensive range’ of similarcontent in the ‘barely legal’ genre which is considered legal as it’s role-played by adult (albeit young-looking) actors.
Although Lady Levitt argued expanding the scope of the bill to include consenting adults ‘risks diverting resources’ from the safeguarding of real children, many others were in support, and it was agreed by 142 votes to 140.
That begs the question of whether future legislation will restrict simulated scenarios if they’re illegal in real life, from voyeurism to teacher/student relationships.
When it comes to the latter, Mark explains it could be outlawed under Sections 21 and 22 of the Sexual Offences Act, which criminalise relationships in which one party is in a position of trust and the other is under 18.
However, like with the above ruling, enforcing this may therefore ‘be complicated by the difficulty of ascertaining whether the relevant participant was depicted as being under the age of 18’.
Mark is keen to stress that he finds the effort being made to limit content which encourages abuse ‘commendable’, ‘as a society we have chosen not to criminalise the depiction of all sorts of things which are illegal to actually do (for example, murder), despite concerns that such depictions in some cases encourage committal of the act in real life.’
Essentially, if the backlash to the Online Safety Act — which civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch described as ‘disastrous for privacy rights and free expression’ — is anything to go by, these changes are likely to provoke a similar response.
This Is Not Right
On November 25, 2024 Metro launched This Is Not Right, a campaign to address the relentless epidemic of violence against women.
With the help of our partners at Women’s Aid, This Is Not Right aims to shine a light on the sheer scale of this national emergency.
You can find more articles here, and if you want to share your story with us, you can send us an email at vaw@metro.co.uk.
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