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Last week, in its dogged commitment to a free and open internet, the UK has instituted a criminal prohibition on certain pornography in England and Wales. It is now a criminal offense to view or possess pornography that depicts "strangulation" including choking or "face sitting", incest including depictions of step siblings, and any depictions of underage roleplay. The penalty for viewing or possessing any of these categories is a prison sentence that ranges from 2-3 years. Publication of these materials has a punishment of up to 5 years in prison.
Before a conservative cheered the prohibition of pornographic materials as a buttress against the immorality of modernity I'd remind him it is worth keeping in mind the context. The UK has been on a tear the past couple decades when it comes to regulating the internet. These efforts did not go without results, culminating most recently in the Online Safety Act of 2023 which pushed an age-verification regime. The OSA is not limited to porn sites to ban minors, but also potentially hits app stores, vendors, payment intermediaries, and more that extends the tendrils of the state into the internet.
Feminists and Labour politicians who hate violence against women, think-of-the-children conservatives, Christian organizations, and Ofcom the regulatory agency which, surprisingly, tends to voice support for more regulations-- what do these constituencies all have in common? It's not the weirdest coalition to lock arms in solidarity, but it's strange bedfellows. Public choice theory stays winning. Many are saying.
I can't claim abstinence, but I am not a big fan of porn. I don't think productions involving toasters are a social good and children should not watch porn. However, what I suspect laws like this to be in practice is to function as a carve out for a censorious state with neurotic apparatchiks to punch up criminal charges whenever they feel like. The next time Tommy Robinson gets picked up for violence they can hit him with the lude pornography laws. There will be no reduction of Violence Against Women when so many report sexual choking as consensual and pleasurable.
If you peruse internet commentary on the Crime and Policing Act 2026 you will find a lot of people who agree with me. From reddit to X, everyone has criticisms that this is selective or ineffective. If you stopped there you wouldn't know that some surveys indicate the majority of Brits support the ban, if not the criminalization. To properly do this experiment Brits must go full bore with social taboos, reverse the sexual revolution, and enforce criminal statutes to that effect. Reinstitute sodomy laws. The cowards will never.
This is a bit of a tangent but I heard (yet another) news programme this morning where somebody here in the UK complained of receiving online death threats, and it struck me that I've never heard of anyone being arrested for making online death threats. I've heard of the (yes, probably cherry picked) examples of people being arrested for misgendering, or today's story of someone being arrested for saying Nigerians should be melted down and used to fill potholes, but never for the apparent epidemic of threatened rape and death. Does it not happen, or is it merely not reported because it's downstream of the far more controversial culture wars?
I Googled "arrested for death threats" and found a story from yesterday about a man who was imprisoned for threatening Kemi Badenoch. I get the impression that, on the rare occasions I hear about people facing legal action for making death threats, the people they threatened were usually politicians.
There was a police investigation into online death threats sent to supermarket heiress and feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez which led to no prosecutions because the people sending the death threats were minors or doing it from outside the jurisdiction. The only cases which are both newsworthy and serious enough to prosecute involve a sane, adult, British man threatening a female celebrity.
PC David Copperfield devotes a chapter in Wasting Police Time to how he was expected to police non-credible death threats, writing from the perspective that they almost always involve teenagers, who will be let off with a caution if the case is prepared for prosecution, and that is in practice dealt with with informal warnings.
Sending credible death threats is something the police take seriously, but given that it tends to be criminal low-lifes threatening each other over drug deals, chavs threatening each other over chavettes, or chavs threatening their chavettes over general disobedience, it isn't newsworthy.
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