England and Wales ban three kinds of porn; the five-year maximum is for sharing

Fact-check · UK law · Online content

Reviewing: viral posts about the pornography offences in the Crime and Policing Act 2026 · Published 2026-11-06 · 26 sources

Verdicts

• Mixed“Possessing or sharing certain sexual content in UK, even homemade, could mean 5 years in jail.” (Bluesky Trending summary)Five years is the maximum for publishing, not possessing; possession tops out at two or three years. The offences apply in England and Wales only. Homemade images are covered, but participants who keep them or share them only with each other have a defence when no one suffered non-consensual harm (and, for the incest and under-16 offences, the people were not actually related or under 16).
• Misleading“Watching face-sitting porn can now get you up to 2 years in the UK.”The Act does not mention face-sitting. It covers realistic images of suffocation, which the Ministry of Justice says could include covering someone’s mouth and nose, so some such images may be caught and courts will decide case by case. The offence is possession, not watching, and individuals can be prosecuted only in England and Wales.
• Mostly True“New UK porn laws do not include films with a rating unless you clip it for horny reasons then you get 2-5 years in jail.”Accurate in substance: the offences exclude films classified by the British Board of Film Classification, and an extract loses that protection if it was taken mainly for sexual arousal and itself shows a covered act. “A rating” means a BBFC certificate specifically, and the law runs in England and Wales.
• Misleading“Having published such an image at any time in the past would also leave one liable now.” (Reason)The offences are not retroactive. Material that stays online or available after 6 November is a continuing publication, and the Ministry told publishers to take it down before then. A one-off share that ended before commencement is not caught.
• MisleadingImplied: the new ban applies across the whole UK.The criminal offences for individuals apply in England and Wales only; Scotland’s version is prospective and Northern Ireland’s is not commenced. But the provisions making them Online Safety Act priority offences extend to the whole UK and took effect on 6 November, so platforms must keep the material from UK users everywhere.

What the law does

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026.^[25] Its sections 104, 106 and 107 insert new offences into the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations, made on 15 October, bring them into force on 6 November 2026; for section 104 the regulations add “so far as it extends to England and Wales.”^[7] That is 191 days after Royal Assent.

Penalties are the maximums on conviction on indictment, as set out in the new sections 67C, 67G and 67J and repeated in the Ministry of Justice guidance.^{[8][10][11][12]} Prosecutions need the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

“Publish” includes “giving or making it available to another person by any means.”^[8] Neither strangulation nor suffocation is defined. The Ministry of Justice says strangulation “generally means one person applying pressure to another person’s neck” and suffocation means “depriving a person of air in a way that affects their ability to breathe,” which “could, for example, involve covering someone’s mouth and nose or compressing their chest.” Whether an image qualifies is “a question of fact for the court in each case.”^[12] The government factsheet adds that the strangulation offence “would therefore include realistic AI generated images.”^[13]

The government’s stated reason is Baroness Bertin’s Independent Pornography Review of February 2025, which the factsheet says found that strangulation pornography “is rife online.”^[13]

The five-year claim and homemade images

Bluesky’s Trending panel on 6 November summarised the story as follows (Crosscheck saw this text but could not archive the panel): “Possessing or sharing certain sexual content in UK, even homemade, could mean 5 years in jail.” Each part needs a qualifier.

Five years

The five-year maximum attaches to publication. The Ministry of Justice guidance is direct: possession carries up to “2 years’ imprisonment” for strangulation or incest material and “3 years’ imprisonment” for under-16 material, and “the maximum penalty for publication for all offences is 5 years’ imprisonment.”^[12] Bundling “possessing or sharing” with “5 years” overstates the possession penalty by at least two years.

“In UK”

The guidance page is headed “Applies to England and Wales.”^[12] See What the posts imply.

Homemade

Homemade images are inside the offence, because the test is what the image shows, not who made it. The Act then gives participants a defence, set out here for the strangulation offence. For possession, a defendant can prove “that the person directly participated in the act portrayed and the act did not involve the infliction of any non-consensual harm on any person.” For publication, the same applies only if “the person only published the image to other persons who directly participated.”^[8] Lawyer Neil Brown reads the publication defence the same way: it permits sharing with the other participants but “would prohibit the sharing of the image online or with social media groups.”^[22] Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a critic of the law, agrees that it “stops short of cracking down on amateurs” who keep such material private and consensual.^[6] The incest and under-16 offences add a condition: the participants must not actually have been related, or neither may actually have been under 16.^[10][11] The defence covers people who “directly participated,” so someone who only filmed has no participant defence.^[8]

Two limits on that defence matter. First, the burden is on the defendant “to prove” it.^[8] Second, “non-consensual harm” borrows the 2008 Act’s definition, which includes harm “of such a nature that the person cannot, in law, consent to it.”^[16] Since the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, consent for sexual gratification is no defence to actual bodily harm or worse.^[19] So a homemade video of an act that caused real injury may fall outside the defence even if both people agreed.

So the Trending line is right that homemade material can carry five years, mainly when it is shared beyond the people in it, and wrong that possession alone reaches five years. Mixed.

Face-sitting and the circulating list

The most common distortion is that the law bans specific acts. A post on Bluesky, repeating the headline of an Investment Watch Blog item, said: “Watching face-sitting porn can now get you up to 2 years in the UK.”^[1][2] Another Bluesky post with 95 likes said the ban “is overwhelmingly targeting ‘face sitting’.”^[5] The blog’s own text is more careful than its headline: it says “England and Wales” and gives two years “for just having it” and five “for posting it.”^[2]

The Act’s text contains no list of acts; it says “strangling or suffocating.”^[8] The list came from iWantClips, a clip-sales platform, which posted a notice that it would remove 17 categories for UK users before 6 November, including “Face Sitting,” “Foot Smother,” “Scissorhold,” “Plastic Fetish” and “Trampling Fantasy,” and that previously purchased clips in those categories would become inaccessible.^[20] Attitude reported the same notice.^[21] Reason concluded that people claiming the law “explicitly bans” these acts “appear to be circulating a list of categories that the porn platform iWantClips has said it will suppress.”^[6] Elizabeth Nolan Brown summarised it on Bluesky: “the UK did not explicitly ban ‘BBW face sitting’ videos or other highly specific sex acts.”^[4] That correction holds against the statute.

The claim is not baseless, though. The Ministry’s working definition of suffocation includes “covering someone’s mouth and nose.”^[12] An image that realistically shows one person cutting off another’s air could be caught whatever the act is called; one that does not show that probably is not. That is for a court to decide, and no court has yet.

“Watching” is a second stretch. The offence is possession. The Ministry says possession “will generally mean having custody or control,” including images “stored on a device, retained in a personal account or cloud.”^[12] The guidance does not say whether streaming without saving counts, and this check found no ruling on that point under the new sections. Rated Misleading: some face-sitting images could fall under the suffocation offence, but the law does not ban the act by name, and it criminalises possession in England and Wales, not viewing across the UK.

Classified films and clips

A Bluesky post with 74 likes said the new laws “do not include films with a rating unless you clip it for horny reasons then you get 2-5 years in jail.”^[3] This is close to the statute. Each new offence says it does not apply to “excluded images, within the meaning of section 64.”^[8][10][11] Section 64 excludes images that are part of a “classified work,” but not an extract that “must reasonably be assumed to have been extracted … solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.”^[15] The 2-to-5-year range matches the possession and publication maximums.^[12] The post leaves out one condition: an extract is caught only if it also shows one of the three covered acts.

The qualifier: a “classified work” means one certified by an authority designated under the Video Recordings Act 1984, the British Board of Film Classification, not any rating body.^[15] A film rated abroad but never classified in the UK does not get the exemption. Mostly True.

Is it retroactive?

A section heading in Reason’s newsletter says the law “Applies Retroactively,” and its text adds: “Having published such an image at any time in the past would also leave one liable now.”^[6] The Ministry guidance makes a narrower point. Possession “is a continuing act,” so anyone holding covered images needed to delete them before 6 November. Publication “can also be a continuing act”: material still uploaded or available must be removed.^[12] Liability attaches to possession or availability on or after 6 November, not to a completed act before it. The guidance frames liability only around possession or availability from 6 November,^[12] so someone who sent an image once in 2025, no longer has it and is not making it available to anyone has not committed the new publication offence. Reason’s own surrounding text describes the continuing-act rule correctly, but the quoted sentence overstates it. Misleading.

What was already illegal

Strangulation in pornography was not wholly unregulated before Friday. Section 63 of the 2008 Act, the “extreme pornography” offence, already made it a crime in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to possess a pornographic image that realistically portrays “an act which threatens a person’s life,” among other acts.^[14] Neil Brown notes that this “could include both strangulation and suffocation.”^[22] Section 63 stays in force alongside the new offences, and possession of such an image still carries up to three years.^[14][17] The two overlap: the new section 67D lets a magistrates’ court that acquits on a section 63 charge convict under section 67A instead.^[8] The new offence differs in three ways:

• Section 63 also requires the image to be “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character”;^[14] section 67A has no such test, so any explicit, realistic pornographic depiction of strangling or suffocating, where the people appear real, qualifies.^[8]
• Section 63 is a possession offence only. Section 67A adds a publication offence with a five-year maximum.^[8]
• Section 63 requires an act that threatens life; section 67A requires only a depiction of strangling or suffocating.^[8][14]

The underlying physical act was also already covered. Since June 2022, intentional strangulation, or any other battery that affects a person’s ability to breathe, has been a standalone offence carrying up to five years; consent is a defence unless serious harm is caused intentionally or recklessly.^[18]

What the posts imply

Implied: the ban applies across the whole UK

The Trending summary and the face-sitting post both say “in UK.” The commencement regulations bring section 104 into force only “so far as it extends to England and Wales,” even though the section also extends to Northern Ireland.^[7] The Act’s extent clause leaves the incest and under-16 offences, sections 106(1) and 107(1), at its default of “England and Wales only.”^[26] Scotland’s parallel offence, section 105, is recorded on legislation.gov.uk as prospective, not in force, as of 6 November.^[9] Scotland’s version, when commenced, gives participants a narrower defence: it applies only if “the act did not actually involve strangulation or suffocation of any person.”^[9]

The platform side is different. The subsections that add the three offences to the Online Safety Act’s list of priority offences extend to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland,^[26] and the regulations commenced them on 6 November without the England-and-Wales limit.^[7] The government says those duties require platforms to prevent “UK users” from encountering the material.^[13] So a person in Scotland cannot yet be prosecuted for possession, but platforms must keep the content from them. Misleading.

Scope: three categories, not all pornography

Shorthand such as “UK porn ban” leaves the scope open. The Ministry guidance describes three categories of “particularly harmful forms of pornography.”^[12] Legal adult pornography outside those categories is untouched by these sections. A different regime governs it: under the Online Safety Act 2023, pornography is “Primary Priority Content” that children must be prevented from accessing,^[24] and the deadline for platforms to put age checks in place was 25 July 2025.^[23] That is an age gate, not a ban.

What it changes

The bigger near-term effect is on platforms, not on individuals. The Act lists all three offences as “priority offences” under the Online Safety Act,^[8][10][11] which the government says obliges services to take “proactive and proportionate steps” to keep such material from UK users, backed by Ofcom fines of up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue.^[13] Reason argues that, unsure what counts, platforms will interpret the law broadly.^[6] The iWantClips notice removes whole categories by label, while the offence turns on what each image shows; many clips in categories such as “Butt Drops” or “Plastic Fetish” need not show anyone’s breathing being restricted. The notice applies to all “users located in the UK,”^[20] which matches the UK-wide reach of the platform duties.^[26] Many posts treat the platform’s list as the law itself.^[5]

For individuals, the practical exposure is possession of saved files and anything they post. Each case needs DPP consent,^[8] and the September factsheet gave no estimate of how many people the offences will catch; the commencement regulations say impact assessments were produced for the Act, which this check did not review.^[7][13]

The government says more is coming. The factsheet describes a “parity sprint” meant to make content that is “illegal offline” illegal online, and a duty on ministers to report within 12 months of Royal Assent on age and consent verification for people appearing in pornography.^[13] That report would be due by late April 2027. The reporting duty is in the Act (section 108); the parity sprint is a stated plan, not law.^[13][25]

What is still unsettled

• Which acts count as “suffocation” in court. The Ministry’s examples are guidance, not law.^[12]
• Whether streaming without saving amounts to possession under the new sections. The guidance does not say.
• When Scotland and Northern Ireland will commence their versions. No date appears in the regulations reviewed here.^[7][9]
• How courts will treat the participant defence where the act carried a risk of injury that the law says a person cannot consent to.^[16][19]

Who is affected

What to watch

• By late April 2027: the ministerial report to Parliament on age and consent verification, due within 12 months of Royal Assent on 29 April 2026.^[13][25]
• No date set: commencement of the Scottish offence (section 105) and of section 104 for Northern Ireland.^[7][9]

Sources