Once you stop to think about it, the need for a law to ensure that participants have consented to appear in online pornography is obvious.
Egregious past failures have been well documented. They range from the New York Times’s investigation of Pornhub, which concluded that one of the world’s biggest pornography businesses hosted videos featuring underaged and sex-trafficked subjects (Pornhub subsequently removed more than half of its content) to the horrors uncovered in the trial of Dominique Pelicot. On the online chat site Coco he shared multiple videos of his then wife, Gisèle, being raped while unconscious in a chatroom called “without her knowledge” (Coco was shut down in 2024).
Such gross abuses make it obvious that such a permissive online environment should never have been allowed. Ending this impunity, so that user-generated and commercially produced online pornography are both more strongly regulated, was among the key recommendations of Conservative peer Gabby Bertin’s independent pornography review. Another recommendation was a law compelling digital pornography businesses to verify the identities of all those featured and to confirm that their consent had been obtained.
These days, not many people in British politics would argue that online pornography has been adequately regulated. The absence until last year of strong age checks means that children, as well as adults, have had easy access to reams of violent content, despite growing evidence of pornography’s role in normalising acts such as strangulation or “choking”. Last month the National Crime Agency blamed online image-sharing and chatrooms for the soaring rate of child sexual abuse in the UK. It said livestreams featuring children could be bought “for as little as £20”.
If you are tempted to look away at this point, I don’t blame you. Most people don’t want to think about children being hurt, or the seemingly insatiable demand for footage of women being degraded, or racialised search terms, or “barely legal” pornography featuring adults role playing as children. Moderators whose job involves scrutinising extreme material describe being traumatised.
Child sexual abuse imagery is, of course, illegal. So is pornography classified as “extreme” under a definition that includes some but not all injuries. The sharing without consent of intimate images obtained in private contexts is also banned. The UK’s online safety act brought in age verification for sites hosting user-generated content and gave the regulator, Ofcom, powers to fine or block businesses. Last year, thanks to the courage of survivors and a group of women in parliament, the government outlawed creating and requesting deepfake pornographic images of real people.
But concerns about consent in relation to professionally produced pornography remain. In 2022 the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation heard from survivors about the distress caused by the continued publication of pornographic footage in which they appear. “A single decision made under pressure, fear, survival, or hope can follow a person for years in ways they could never have imagined,” one campaigner explained.
The Labour MP Diana Johnson was the first to propose in parliament consent verification and a new right for performers to withdraw it. Last year another Labour MP, Jess Asato, tried again. But this month, for the first time, the measure has a good chance of becoming law after the House of Lords accepted an amendment to the crime and policing bill tabled by Bertin.
Pressure from Bertin and her allies, who include senior Labour figures, has already led ministers to agree to outlaw strangulation imagery and scenes purporting to show incest. They have also said that they will close the online/offline gap. Currently, the British Board of Film Classification refuses to license DVDs if they are judged “likely to encourage an interest in sexually abusive activity” or feature “acts that are likely to cause serious physical harm”. On the internet, there are no equivalent rules. Ministers have also stressed their commitment to tackling online misogyny through education – another theme of the pornography review.
But having held back from pledges on consent the government now faces a choice: accept the bill as amended and make the UK a pioneer in online pornography regulation, or strip the new clause out. While the former seems more likely, it is far from guaranteed. If Bertin had not won the support of influential peers including Beeban Kidron and Helena Kennedy, it is not clear that ministers would have gone as far as they have. There is no sign that they plan to adopt her proposal that police should gather data on illegal pornography use, for example, to find out if it is linked to other crimes. Plenty of disturbing anecdotes back up this idea: violent pornography was found across Wayne Couzens’s devices after he was arrested for the murder of Sarah Everard. And campaigners against the use of “rough sex” as a defence to murder charges have demonstrated a pattern of pornography use by perpetrators.
From the late 1970s, the women’s liberation movement in the US became riven with arguments about pornography and the wider issue of sex for sale. Fifty years on, this remains a challenging area in which to legislate in the UK as well. Even now, when research tells us that 79% of children in England have viewed violent pornography and the malign potential of eroticised sadism seems clear, you do not have to look far for claims of a “moral panic” or arguments that sex education is all that is required. Ideas about the libido as a creative, freeing force have been bound up with radical politics for centuries. Does this inheritance, combined with their generally hopeful view of human nature, make some progressives especially reluctant?
Twenty-five years ago this month, the novelist Martin Amis wrote an article about the trend towards violence in pornography for the Guardian. As he watched some of the new, “out there” videos in his hotel room, he described how he “kept worrying that I’d like it … If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it.”
I think that Amis was right to be anxious. Viewers as well as performers take risks with pornography, all the more so in our age of algorithms engineered to elicit the strongestpossible response. People need protecting from such excesses, while those who agree to be filmed having sex must have the right to withdraw permission for others to watch. When the crime bill returns to the Commons, the government should throw its weight behind a new, stronger model of consent.
Susanna Rustin is a social affairs journalist and the author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism
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