LONDON—Alex Davies-Jones, MP, the United Kingdom’s minister for victims and violence against women and girls, announced yesterday that she was able to amend the Crime and Policing Bill to prohibit “incest simulation” pornography content available in the country’s digital space.
The Crime and Policing Bill, initiated last year, is in the report stage in the House of Lords. The bill advanced through the House of Commons last summer.
The amendments include “semen-defaced images” and the act of screenshotting intimate videos without the consent of the person and the people depicted. “Incest and step-incest pornography” were identified as “hardcore pornography” that falls under the “legal but harmful” standards under the Online Safety Act.
All of this derives from findings and recommendations made by the U.K.’s pornography commission, led by Baroness Gabby Bertin, a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. Baroness Bertin recommended that incest simulation would be guilty of a crime to equalize real-life violations of incest and sexual abuse laws.
“[Some] online pornographic content depicts disturbing ‘role-play’ including incest and adults role-playing as children—evidence shows that this type of pornography is used by perpetrators to permit child sex abuse,” Lady Bertin’s recommendations read. “This is totally unacceptable.”
“I make recommendations to make incest pornography illegal, and for content that might encourage an interest in child sex abuse to be prohibited,” adds the report.
Note that this is the same report that recommended bans on strangulation pornography, regardless of whether the content is actually consensual and controlled. And under the amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill, this would empower Ofcom, the country’s digital regulator, to take action against sites hosting content depicting either strangulation or incestuous relations.
“The current criminal justice response is ineffective in tackling illegal pornography online,” notes the Bertin report.
Recommendations also include that the “[government] should conduct its own legislative review of this regime to ensure that legislation and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) guidance is fit-for-purpose in tackling illegal pornography in the online world. [...] Pornographic content that depicts incest should be made illegal.”
Fetish content and BDSM often feature consensual choking play and consensual sadomasochism, and are consistently popular content categories in adult video.
“Abuse of victims is ever-evolving in the online world and the offline world,” said Davies-Jones in an interview with the British tabloid Metro. “We need to act, and we need a criminal justice system that’s fit for modern times.”
Metro additionally reported that the criminalization of simulated incest porn will not cover “step-incest” or “step-family” categories of pornography, which are a popular taboo category in straight, gay and more niche fetish porn markets. Davies-Jones told the outlet that the U.K. government intends to conduct “a broader review [around extreme pornography] and looking at what more needs to be done.”
“It’s becoming normalised in society, and that is a problem,” she added. “We want everyone to be aware of what a healthy consensual relationship is, which is why this is also part of our violence against women and girls strategy around education and prevention.”
