Extreme porn becomes illegal in UK as police warn teens are spiralling into abuse

From Friday, it's a crime in England and Wales to publish or possess pornography showing strangulation, incest — including some step-relations — or adults acting out fantasies of sex with under-16s. Officials have been pushing ads across social media telling extreme porn users to delete it or face up to five years in prison.

Frontline officers say the ban is overdue, but they're not pretending it'll be easy. DC Sarah Turner, who investigates child abuse with West Mercia police, called the material a gateway: teen is one of the most searched porn terms, and appetite for it blurs lines fast. Her boss, DCI Gerard Smith, wants the heat on the distributors — the platforms pushing the content — not just the people watching it. Across England and Wales, police arrest around 1,000 people a month for online child sexual abuse offences, most of them men, and Smith said the volume keeps climbing.

The officers say they watch the same story play out again and again. Men describe drifting from extreme porn into numbness, then into a darker place — and many say they're relieved to be caught, according to DC Pep Saladino. On the dark web, Turner said, abuse sites mimic the look of ordinary porn sites, sometimes with identical search terms. The difference is that the videos show real children being sexually abused.

Teenagers are tangled up in this too, some barely into their teens. Some cases are sexting between kids; others involve young people stumbling onto violent abuse images through chat sites and forums. Smith said several forces are eyeing a pilot modelled on a Surrey project called Solah, which sends civilians rather than officers to visit children viewing illegal material. The thinking: unless a child is coercing others, police aren't the best people to deliver safeguarding advice.

Clare McGlynn, a Durham University law professor who studies porn regulation, wants ministers to shout louder about who the law is really aimed at. She's worried online misinformation has convinced people it's about policing their phones, when it's about platforms stripping out egregious content — strangulation and incest played as normal, adults acting out child abuse, all pushed by algorithms for profit, she told the Guardian. McGlynn also asked what social media sites like X plan to do about the horrific material sitting on them. The law grew out of a report by Conservative peer Gabby Bertin, which called for a new regulator; McGlynn suggested the British Board of Film Classification could take the job, and called Ofcom a lethargic regulator so far.

Ofcom pushed back, saying it's legally required to consult before changing its guidance and codes, with that consultation planned for the first half of 2027. In the meantime, the watchdog said it has investigated more than 100 platforms and fined 11 providers over £7m in the first 18 months of the Online Safety Act. Vicky Young of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which runs the Stop It Now helpline for people trying to quit viewing abuse images, welcomed the ban, saying thousands of callers have described extreme porn as a step on their path to illegal material.