Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Bertin Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, hers is never an easy act to follow but I want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, so much for her work. I say to her: “Back at you”, as I will be supporting her work in this Bill as well. I also welcome the Minister to this House—what an asset she will be to it and the Government. I graciously thank her and this Government for the announcement around the criminalisation of depictions of strangulation. However, the law has to be well drafted, because the industry will find every loophole it possibly can. It is like water dripping through the cracks. It will already be thinking about it, because it is a very popular and profitable genre, so I would appreciate some back and forth on that to make sure we absolutely get it right. This is a big Bill, so we do not want to spend time arguing over things that we basically agree on.

Pornography has long existed, and it is not going anywhere anytime soon, but its scale, nature and impact have changed dramatically. As many noble Lords have already said, today, free and easily accessible content is increasingly violent, degrading and misogynistic. This is not a niche issue. Over a quarter of the UK population regularly accesses online pornography, a third of men say they watch it weekly, and the average age of first exposure is just 13. Technology such as nudification apps designed to sexually humiliate are still legal and very prolific.

This is not confined to pornography sites. Violent sexual content is now present on social media, X being the worst offender, and mainstream platforms. Homepages of major porn sites display material with titles including words like “attack”, “kidnap”, “force” and “violate”. Mainstream search engines very quickly get you to thousands of videos with harmful titles such as: “He overdid it and now she is dead” and “Lawyer strangled, bound and gagged in a van”—these are just the ones I can read out. I am pleased the little ones have gone from the Chamber. Content involving themes of incest and child abuse are also disturbingly prevalent. The free-to-view porn business model has driven this extremity. This is rewiring how young people think about sex, gender and relationships. We know that toxic masculinity is rising, and experts warn of links between viewing extreme pornography and committing sexual violence. Indeed, online porn has been described by one expert as

“the largest unregulated social experiment in human history”.

We discovered this during the review. The impact is far-reaching. Choking has now become a sexual norm. That is why the law needs to be changed, but it will take a while to reverse this. Some 38% of women under 40 say they have been strangled during sex. Nurses reported to us that they deal with sexually inflicted injuries on a very regular basis. Teachers reported pupils’ confusion over what constitutes sexual assault. Increasingly, there are reports of sexual dysfunction among men who find real-life intimacy less stimulating than online extremes, leading to many relationship breakdowns. When I met with Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter last month, she was adamant that online pornography played a role in her father’s crimes, and Dame Angiolini, in her inquiry, highlighted that Sarah Everard’s murderer had a history of viewing violent pornography.

Yet, despite the harm and the pace at which extreme online content has proliferated, legislation has lagged far behind. There is no external moderation nor proactive monitoring. There is no one government department with overall accountability or responsibility. Laws are patchy and rarely enforced. I am delighted that one recommendation out of 32 has been taken forward, but there is a lot more to do. In stark contrast, the world of offline pornography, such as DVDs, is regulated by the British Board of Film Classification, which my noble friend Lady Benjamin spoke about.

These amendments will absolutely do just that and will seek to reduce this imbalance in the law. It cannot be right that offline law refuses to classify material that promotes or depicts child sexual abuse, incest, trafficking, torture and harmful sexual acts. This has to change. These recommendations and amendments would ensure that not only the act of incest but also its depiction is banned along with material that encourages an interest in child sexual abuse. They would bring parity between material prohibited online and offline. They would also compel sites and platforms to verify the age and consent of anyone appearing on them.

This is not about ending pornography; it is about putting proportionate and necessary guard-rails back in place. I do not stand here naively and think that these amendments will solve everything overnight, but I believe these changes could bring good, workable and enforceable law that, at long last, is in step with technological developments and growing national sentiment.

To our daughters, it would say there is no industry or subculture that condones or excuses violence against them. To the porn industry and the ecosystem it supports, it would say that they can no longer avoid accountability or scrutiny. To our sons—who are also damaged in all this—regulating online pornography says to them that what they see on their screens is not normal, it is not acceptable and it is not inevitable. When we come to later stages, I urge noble Lords and the Government to support these amendments. I apologise for overrunning.