LONDON—An independent review conducted for consideration by the U.K. government calls for a potential ban of adult entertainment content that is “legal but harmful”—or that characterized as “extreme pornography.” With a report officially released Thursday, the review presented to the U.K. government is the latest attempt to restrict otherwise legal material.
As AVN reported Wednesday, the independent review was led by Baroness Gabrielle Bertin, a Conservative Party peer in the House of Lords. Lady Bertin believes that material she views as extreme should be prohibited in the United Kingdom.
Key recommendations offered by the Bertin-led review call for government ministers to additionally empower the country’s communications regulator, Ofcom, to police legal pornography websites that host “legal but harmful” material.
Lady Bertin’s final report, “Creating a Safer World: The Challenge of Regulating Online Pornography,” gave other recommendations as “practical, workable recommendations to help us create a safer world of online pornography for all those involved.”
“I want to be clear that I do not approach this subject from a prudish or disapproving position,” argued Bertin. “I am a liberal Conservative and a proponent of free speech. […] But we need to strike the right balance between protecting those principles and protecting society, particularly the most vulnerable, from potential risks.”
Much of the report provides a deep dive into the need to protect people from violations of their rights, including image-based sexual abuse, human trafficking claims and deepfakes. Bertin falsely conflates these very real issues with the otherwise legal and consensual adult space.
Of note, a so-called “Safe Pornography Code of Practice” is proposed that explicitly prohibits “extreme” pornography. The review proposes, “Legal but harmful content could be ‘prohibited’ online, with additional regulatory duties on services displaying pornography through the Online Safety Act 2023. […] The code would set out measures companies can take—including content moderation and safety-by design measures—to tackle legal but harmful pornographic content and would be enforced by Ofcom.”
Also, Bertin intimates that the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) should be granted the power to rate pornography content as if it were a mainstream movie.
Mike Stabile, director of public policy for the adult industry trade group the Free Speech Coalition, told AVN the coalition is disappointed with the review.
“Free Speech Coalition was consulted on the report, and our calls were often contentious,” Stabile explained in an emailed statement. “From the beginning of the process, it was clear that the review had a specific goal—broad censorship of adult content—something we fought about and pushed back against aggressively.”
He continued, “While the report claims to focus on ‘extreme’ content, in reality, the terms they’re using are vague, ill-defined, subjective, and broad.
“If [this is] passed into law, it opens up the possibility of policing of consensual content and behavior,” he added. “There were initiatives in the report that we could support, like the push for banking and the fight against revenge porn and CSAM. Unfortunately, by criminalizing consensual content, it blurs the lines and only makes that fight harder.”
And criminalizing consensual content throws significant concern into the discussion. Some of the examples of “extreme” pornography or material that is “legal but harmful” include popular fetishes and kinks, including various categories and subcategories of BDSM, consensual choking, CNC, CBT, age-play and countless others.
Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist and bioinformatics programmer at the University of California, Los Angeles, told AVN she was alarmed by the report.
“This attempt in the U.K. to define content as ‘extreme’ has no basis in science; it appears to be an effort to reduce or block adult access to legal sexual material that some people do not enjoy,” Prause told AVN, explaining that she feels proposed regulations “like this often consider anything other than explicit verbal consent to be violent or extreme.
“Yet, scientists have demonstrated … that all the most popular sexual films analyzed demonstrated explicit consent, such as one partner drawing the other partner to them, expressing explicit pleasure verbally, or other common signs,” Prause said.
“Draconian attempts to limit adult access to legal material do not appear to be based on any modern scientific understanding of sexual consent depictions.”
A review of existing literature by Woodhull Freedom Foundation researchers Melodie Garcia and Dr. Allison Grossman concluded that pornography deemed “extreme” doesn’t necessarily link to harmful and criminal behaviors, including sexism and violence against women and children.
“Pornography is often used as a scapegoat for sexism and sexual violence, or as a pretext for censorship of sexual health or education,” wrote Garcia and Grossman. “If we truly want to stop sexual assault and violence, there are actually effective methods of prevention.”
