LONDON—U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing a potential rebellion from within his own Labor Party if his government doesn't put its support behind a proposed ban on taboo pornography baked into the current Crime and Policing Bill.
This comes after the House of Lords voted, 144 to 143, to amend the bill earlier this month with a ban on simulated incest pornography, step-relations pornography and content like consensual strangulation.
Many "backbenchers," primarily female MPs in Starmer's party, have expressed concern over "step-incest" pornography being available in the country's digital space and how it could contribute to the harm of victims of child sexual abuse by a parent, reports The Telegraph and Sky News online.
Per The Telegraph, one unnamed Labor member of Parliament characterized "step-incest" pornography as a supposed "gateway drug" to actual illegal material. As AVN has previously reported, several members of Labor have partnered with Tory MPs to criminalize "step-family" sexual relations, despite being fictional depictions.
According to Pornhub Insights' 2025 Year in Review, "step mom" remains one of the most searched terms on the popular tube site.
If the law is fully implemented, an entire class of legal pornography series and features depicting step-relationships would be subject to potential criminal prosecution by the Crown Prosecution Service and local, regional, and national law enforcement agencies, like the Metropolitan Police Service and other regional police agencies.
Baroness Gabby Bertin, MP, the peer who led Parliament's independent review on the alleged harms of pornography, spoke to the Lords, urging restrictions on content that depicts taboo material, like "intercourse with a step-child."
Bertin added that online pornography depicts sexual scenes "with settings in children's bedrooms, with actors in children's clothes, braces, toys, pigtails, and other markers of childhood. Millions of videos and images are then tagged as 'little,' 'tiny,' 'age gap,' 'mommy,' 'daddy,' or 'teen.'"
The government wrote a bill to ban possessing or publishing pornography depicting sex between relatives, which AVN outlined previously.
The "step-incest" and pornography related to step-family relationships caused a stir with the justice minister, Baroness Alison Levitt, with the peer noting on behalf of the government that while such relationships are controversial, they are "not illegal in real life," per Sky's reporting on the matter.
It was also Levitt who expressed concerns over the enforcement of consent withdrawal amendments added to the Crime and Policing Bill.
That amendment would allow anyone who appears in adult content to withdraw consent at any time, or producers of the material could face imprisonment and fines. Initial consent to publication would be viewed as irrelevant. If consent is withdrawn, platforms and studios must comply with the request and remove the content within 24 hours of notice.
