Extreme pornography ban begins as police warn over teenagers caught in abuse

Police forces are turning to specialist charities and partner agencies to help with growing numbers of teenagers caught up in online child abuse, as new pornography laws come into force on Friday.

Across England and Wales, officers arrest about 1,000 people a month — most of them men — for online child sexual abuse offences. Frontline officers warn that young people are being drawn down a pathway through extreme content that can lead to real-life abusive images of children.

"This will be difficult to police," said DC Sarah Turner, part of a team of specialist officers investigating child abuse in West Mercia. "Teen is one of the most popular porn terms; there is a huge appetite for this material, it leads to blurred lines."

From Friday it becomes illegal to publish or possess pornography showing strangulation, incest — including some step-relations — or adults acting out fantasies of sex with under-16s. The ban follows years of campaigning linking pornography to real-life harm.

Officers weigh a different approach

DCI Gerard Smith, who leads the West Mercia team, said arrests were rising "very significantly" and argued that attention had to fall on distributors "in order to prevent the sharing of this material at source".

The officers come across so many young people, some in their early teens, that they are examining a pilot scheme that would send civilians to visit children who are viewing illegal material. Some cases involve sexting between teenagers; others involve teenagers being exposed to violent images of child abuse through chat sites and forums.

Smith pointed to a successful project in Surrey called Solah. "We don't want to criminalise children, so if there are no aggravating factors like they are coercing others, then the police are not the best agency to provide safeguarding advice," he said.

DC Pep Saladino said the men police arrest describe a "numbness to extreme material" and a desensitisation that brings them to "a dark place", and often tell officers they are glad to have been caught. DS Peter Wheeler said many young adults began watching pornography as children and "escalated down the rabbit hole".

Regulator pressed to act

Ministry of Justice adverts circulating on social media warn extreme pornography users to "delete it" before 6 November or face prison sentences of up to five years.

Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University, said she was concerned about online misinformation suggesting the law policed what individuals keep on their phones. "It's not. This is about platforms removing very egregious content," she said, citing the normalisation of strangulation and incest and extreme material pushed by algorithms "for profit by porn platforms".

The law was sparked by a report by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin, which called for a new regulatory body to oversee the pornography industry. McGlynn suggested the British Board of Film Classification could take that role and described Ofcom as "a lethargic regulator".

Ofcom said new legal duties on tech companies would take effect once it had updated its codes of practice and guidance, with consultation planned for the first half of 2027. It said that in the first 18 months of the Online Safety Act it had investigated more than 100 platforms and issued fines totalling more than £7m against 11 providers.

Vicky Young of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which runs the Stop It Now helpline, welcomed the ban, saying thousands of callers reported that extreme pornography had played a role in their pathway to viewing illegal sexual images of children.

Source: The Guardian.