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........

© The Guardian