Illegal Porn in England: What Has Applied Since 6 November and What It Means for Us

8 Nov 2026 · @Dan Apus Monoceros

Since 6 November 2026, it has been a criminal offence in England and Wales to possess or publish certain kinds of porn, even when everyone involved is an adult and has consented. The legal basis is the Crime and Policing Act 2026, which became law on 29 April. It covers depictions that are everyday practice in our scene: breath play, face sitting, age-gap role play and role play with incest fantasies. And because “possession” explicitly includes the cloud, it affects anyone who flies to London with their phone.

Please note: this is not legal advice, and what I have been able to find so far is still very vague. A lot will probably change. Even so, here is a summary of what I found:

What exactly is banned

The law names three categories. All three apply to pornographic images and videos that show an act in an explicit and realistic way.

First, strangulation and suffocation. According to the Ministry of Justice, strangulation means pressure on the neck, and suffocation means any interference with breathing, for example by covering the mouth and nose or by pressure on the chest. This includes breath play and choking, but also smothering (covering the mouth and nose with body parts such as breasts), face sitting, neck rope and parts of manhandling. In my assessment, tight rope around the chest, sitting on someone’s chest or tightly cinched chest harnesses/corsets can also fall under it as soon as the image shows breathlessness. Many ties restrict breathing without outsiders noticing. If that restriction becomes visible in the image, it is depicted and can be an offence. What a court will count as a realistic depiction of suffocation is still open.

Second, penetrative sex between people whom a “reasonable person” would think are related, even if they are only playing. According to the government, this means close relatives such as father and daughter or brother and sister. Step and foster relationships are included if one person is under 18 or pretends to be. That covers typical porn scenarios such as “step-sister”, “mean big brother” or “uncle”. Calling someone Daddy does not by itself make them a relative. It gets tricky when the scene tells a father-child story or plays a younger age; then the third category can apply as well. On top of that, many kinky and polyamorous people call their partners family, “my brother” or “my sister”, without being related. If the people also look alike, outsiders can easily take that for a real family relationship.

Third, sexual activity in which at least one person is under 16 or pretends to be. The new part is “pretends to be”. The government states explicitly that this refers to adults playing children. It makes me think of performances I regularly see on stage: the Japanese schoolgirl in rope, the two rascal boys making out, the teacher punishing a schoolboy. Everyone involved is an adult. From my own experience, though, I know that outsiders regularly misjudge people’s age. The law itself draws one line: nobody counts as “pretending” if it is fanciful that the person is actually the age being played. Sound and accompanying information, such as a video title, are taken into account. On my reading, a clearly adult little in a onesie is therefore unlikely to be covered, while a young-looking model in a school uniform with a matching title probably is. Here too, only the courts will decide exactly where the line runs.

Anything that looks realistic is covered, including AI-generated images. A phone filter or the right make-up could therefore be enough to make a person appear “not old enough”.

Possession carries up to two years in prison, up to three for the third category. Publishing carries up to five years. Publishing already means making something available to another person, so sending it via a messenger app counts.

There are few exceptions: if you have never seen an image and had no reason to suspect anything; if something was sent to you unrequested and you do not keep it for an unreasonable length of time; if you took part yourself; and if you have a “legitimate reason”. The government does not explain this further; what counts as a legitimate reason remains open. The law does not apply in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

The trigger was a 2025 review by Conservative peer Baroness Gabby Bertin. She argued that choking scenes are widespread on porn sites and normalise choking during sex. The government introduced the ban in November 2025; platforms face fines of up to £18 million for breaches. Non-consensual choking was already a criminal offence in England before.

What this means for creators, platforms and sex education

The platform iWantClips is blocking 17 categories for UK users, including Choking Fantasy Play, Breath Play Fantasy, Hand Over Mouth and Face Sitting. Clips that were already bought disappear as well. According to 404 Media, the list also includes ass and breast smothering, trampling and “butt drops”. This applies equally to creators outside the UK: their material can no longer be reached by UK customers. Dommes expect a noticeable loss of income. What choking and suffocation mean exactly and how they are defined (after all, nobody actually suffocates) will ultimately be decided by the courts. Until then, platforms tend to interpret the terms too broadly rather than too narrowly.

The new criminal law comes on top of a rule that has applied since 25 July 2025: anyone offering porn in the UK must carry out effective age checks, by ID, credit card or face scan. Pornhub says it lost 77% of its UK traffic as a result, and since 2 February 2026 it no longer accepts new UK users. VPN use rose at times from around 650,000 to over 1.4 million people per day.

The regulator Ofcom also fines providers based abroad, for example £1.35 million. For sex toys, this mainly affects marketing: Ofcom considers images unproblematic if they show a toy “as is” and not in use. How far that applies to choke collars or breath play gear is unclear.

The damage to sex education weighs more heavily. An analysis by the University of Glasgow describes how the age checks alone are already holding back harmless content on sexual health, LGBTQ+ forums and support services. We know similar effects from the moderation of sexual content on Instagram and other platforms.

The typical traps

Most problems come from automatic processes you don’t consciously control:

• Cloud storage: The government explicitly counts images in a cloud account as possession. Whether access from England to a server in Germany is already enough has not been clarified.

• “Recently deleted”: Under a 2006 ruling, you only stop possessing a deleted image once you can no longer retrieve it. The bin and “Recently deleted” therefore still count.

• Messenger apps: Telegram and WhatsApp groups download media automatically. The protection for unrequested material only applies if you don’t keep the files for an unreasonable length of time.

• Purchased clips, old hard drives, laptop backups: Anything you once downloaded, or that is reachable through an account with purchased content, is easily forgotten, especially on devices you hardly use any more.

• Your own recordings: Sending your own breath play pictures to your partner counts as publishing under the law.

• Grey areas: Rope on the neck, a hand over the mouth, face sitting, tight lacing. Only the courts will settle where the line lies. Until then, I expect platforms and investigators to interpret the law broadly.

A short trip to London: how to travel with less stress

According to a 2023 parliamentary debate, UK border officers probably cannot simply demand that you unlock your phone. It could get tricky if your device ends up with the police for another reason, after a theft or a complaint.

So I recommend:

• Leave laptops, hard drives and USB sticks with this kind of material at home.

• Before you leave, go through photos, downloads and messenger media, and empty “Recently deleted”.

• Turn off automatic media download in your messenger apps for the trip.

• Disable cloud sync and offline files on your travel device, or log out. Whether that is legally enough has not been clarified. Storage that your travel device cannot access at all is safer.

• While there, don’t buy, download, post or send anything, including your own material.

• If you are stopped: don’t make any statement without a lawyer.

How practical this is in everyday life is something everyone has to judge for themselves. And there are probably places you won’t think of: are you still logged in to Pornhub on your phone, and is there something from last night still sitting in your browser cache?

My view – choking and breath play

Breath play is one of the most dangerous practices we do in the scene. There is good evidence that porn with such scenes normalises choking during sex. In a representative survey at a US university, more frequent porn use predicted more exposure to choking scenes, and that in turn predicted whether men choked their female partners during sex. This worked through three beliefs: that choking is pleasurable, that it is safe, and that it does not require consent (Wright, Herbenick & Tokunaga 2021). Porn is not the only source, though. In an interview study, young women had also learned about choking from erotic stories, magazines, social media, friends and partners (Herbenick et al. 2022).

This is exactly where the law does not reach. Choking scenes outside of porn remain legal, and dangerous breath games have been spreading among children and teenagers via social media for years. In the so-called choking game or fainting game, teenagers choke themselves until they pass out, or they breathe fast and deep and then have someone squeeze their chest. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted at least 82 deaths among 6- to 19-year-olds between 1995 and 2007; almost all of them died alone. In 2009, paediatricians in Canada found 65 YouTube videos of teenagers demonstrating the game; 55% of them showed a seizure caused by lack of oxygen. Since 2021, a variant has been circulating as the “blackout challenge”, mostly associated with TikTok. The families of four British teenagers aged 12 to 14, including Archie Battersbee, are suing TikTok, alleging that their children died doing it in 2022. In the US, the lawsuit over the death of ten-year-old Nylah Anderson may proceed following an appeals court ruling in August 2024; TikTok’s algorithm allegedly recommended the videos to her. TikTok denies that the challenge was ever a trend on its platform. None of this is porn, and none of it is covered by the new law.

My own view is divided. For a long time I didn’t offer breath play workshops because I didn’t want to sell a false sense of security, as if it could be done with guaranteed safety. Today I see it differently: in my workshops I want to convey exactly this uncertainty and an awareness of risk, and show ways to make it safer.

I find it questionable whether adults who have already passed an age check should be restricted in what they watch and punished for it. Warnings about the practice would have been a milder option, as would obligations for large platforms instead of penalties for consumers or for people who only share images with their partners. Making mere possession a crime is, in my view, a disproportionate intrusion into sexual self-determination for such a widespread practice.

Most Britons disagree: according to YouGov, 78% support the ban on depictions of choking. England has tried something like this before. In 2014, numerous fetish acts were banned in porn; in 2019 that was reversed. This time the ban is in criminal law, with prison for individuals, and here too only the courts will clarify the limits. Should we delete everything irreversibly until then? And will we be allowed to own it again afterwards?

I expect education on the topic to become harder. Whether interest will drop as a result, or whether many people will instead have choking “demonstrated” to them by sexual partners, without context and without safety knowledge, remains to be seen.

My view – role play

On role play I come to a different conclusion. Realistic depictions of sex with minors or between actual relatives were rightly banned already. What is new is that clearly staged scenes between adults are now a crime as well. Behind this lies the assumption that such porn encourages or normalises these fantasies.

Research suggests rather that the fantasies are older than the porn. In the largest survey on sexual fantasies to date (Justin Lehmiller, Kinsey Institute, 4,175 participants), taboo fantasies were among the common themes. As the origin of their biggest fantasy, respondents named their own experiences as adults, books, films, experiences from childhood and adolescence, or unfulfilled desires. Lehmiller describes fantasies as biopsychosocial: biology, psyche and environment work together, and fantasies often show which needs are being met and which are not. The industry serves this demand. Sociologist Chauntelle Tibbals, who researches the porn industry, explains the boom in step scenarios by saying that production follows consumption. Our own biography is therefore a plausible source of such fantasies. It does not follow, however, that a trauma typically lies behind them.

Whether porn helps people deal with such needs has not been scientifically established. But I am not aware of any robust data showing that clearly staged role play between adults leads to real abuse. For a criminal law, that would be exactly the necessary basis. I think it is more useful for people to be able to talk about their fantasies: with their partner, in coaching or in therapy. In my view, porn can be a source of inspiration and help people accept and better understand their own needs. A law that punishes mere possession makes this conversation harder.

What about you?

Do you know what is on your phone when you travel? And how much say should a state have when adults do something consensually and take pictures of it?

Sources:

Crime and Policing Act 2026: Offences relating to pornography – https://www.gov.uk/guidance/crime-and-policing-act-2026-offences-relating-to-pornography

Crime and Policing Act 2026: pornography factsheet – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/crime-and-policing-act-2026-factsheets/crime-and-policing-act-2026-pornography-factsheet

UK to ban porn depicting strangulation – https://thenewfeminist.co.uk/?p=15929

Strangulation in porn set to become illegal as UK tech firms face £18m fines – https://www.attitude.co.uk/news/strangulation-in-porn-to-become-illegal-uk-502470/

UK porn site to block 17 fetish categories for UK users ahead of new law – https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/10/30/iwantclips-uk-porn-laws-2026/

In the UK, Face Sitting Porn Might Land You in Jail – https://www.404media.co/uk-crime-and-policing-act-pornography/

UK new pornography ban comes into effect: what isn't allowed – https://newsweek.com/uk-new-pornography-ban-comes-effect-what-isnt-allowed-12669252

Pornhub to block new UK users over tougher age-check rules – https://dig.watch/updates/pornhub-to-block-new-uk-users-over-tougher-age-check-rules

UK porn site traffic plunges since age checks – but VPN use up – https://www.inkl.com/news/uk-porn-site-traffic-plunges-since-age-checks-but-vpn-use-up

Ofcom fines porn company £1.35m for not having age checks – https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/ofcom-fines-porn-company-1.35-million-for-not-having-age-checks

Will new UK age verification rules affect our industry? – https://www.erotictradeonly.com/will-new-uk-age-verification-rules-affect-our-industry/

Is the Online Safety Act censoring sexual health content? – https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/research/sociological-cultural-studies-research/blog/headline_1273851_en.html

R v Porter [2006] EWCA Crim 560 – https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/crim/2006/560

Digital devices: search powers at the UK border – https://parallelparliament.co.uk/debate/2023-12-05/commons/westminster-hall/digital-devices-search-powers-at-the-uk-border

Britons support ban on porn depicting strangulation, incest or people who appear to be under 16 – https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/55900-britons-support-ban-on-porn-depicting-strangulation-incest-or-people-who-appear-or-are-pretending-to-be-under-16

U.K. Bans Possession of Porn Depicting Choking, Suffocation, or Pretend Incest – https://reason.com/2026/11/02/u-k-bans-possession-of-porn-depicting-choking-suffocation-or-pretend-incest/

Wright, Herbenick & Tokunaga: Pornography Consumption and Sexual Choking: An Evaluation of Theoretical Mechanisms (Health Communication) – https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2021.1991641

Herbenick et al.: “It Was Scary, But Then It Was Kind of Exciting”: Young Women's Experiences with Choking During Sex (Archives of Sexual Behavior) – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34761344/

Lehmiller: Where Do Our Sexual Fantasies Come From? – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-myths-sex/201807/where-do-our-sexual-fantasies-come

Interview with Chauntelle Tibbals on faux-cest – https://www.chauntelletibbals.com/?p=4606

Crime and Policing Act 2026, Section 107: Pornographic images of sexual activity with child under 16 – https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/20/section/107

CDC (MMWR 2008): Unintentional Strangulation Deaths from the “Choking Game” Among Youths Aged 6–19 Years, United States, 1995–2007 – https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5706a1.htm

Linkletter, Gordon & Dooley: The choking game and YouTube: a dangerous combination (Clinical Pediatrics) – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19596864/

Parents sue TikTok over child deaths allegedly caused by “blackout challenge” (The Guardian) – https://inkl.com/news/tiktok-sued-over-deaths-of-children-said-to-have-attempted-blackout-challenge

Anderson v. TikTok, Inc., No. 22-3061 (3d Cir. 2024) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_v._TikTok