Owning or sharing pornography that “explicitly and realistically” depicts strangulation or suffocation became a crime in England and Wales on Friday, when new offenses in the Crime and Policing Act 2026 took effect.
The same provisions cover pornography showing penetrative sex between people a “reasonable person” would think are related, or pretending to be, and sex involving someone who is, or is pretending to be, under 16, the age of consent. According to the law, possessing the strangulation, suffocation or incest material carries up to two years in prison, and the under-16 material up to three. Publishing any of it can bring five years. The offenses reach material recorded privately at home and never sold, Samantha Cole reported for 404 Media, and they also apply to realistic AI-generated images, Newsweek reported.
The Ministry of Justice treats possession as a continuing act, so anyone still holding the material on Friday could be committing an offense, according to government guidance on the start date. People were told to delete it permanently beforehand. Sending an image privately can count as publication.
The act itself doesn’t define strangulation or suffocation. The guidance offers a working version: “We consider that strangulation generally means one person applying pressure to another person’s neck,” while suffocation “will generally mean depriving a person of air in a way that affects their ability to breathe. Unlike strangulation, this does not require pressure to the neck. It could, for example, involve covering someone’s mouth and nose or compressing their chest.” The courts will settle the rest. The Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry group, said in a guide for performers and platforms that the government has said the content doesn’t have to look life-threatening to count.
That leaves open whether common acts like face sitting fall under the law. One site isn’t waiting to find out. iWantClips told creators in Britain that it “is required to remove certain categories of content from the platform for Artists located in the UK,” according to creators who use it, and listed every variety of smothering, all face sitting, face sitting in jeans specifically, “butt drops” and trampling.
Vex Ashley, a performer and producer who owns the independent studio Four Chambers, said that while the bill moved through Parliament this year she went through her back catalog and found that the film she considers her “magnum opus,” about the sexual archetype of the mother, could contain criminal content.
“I had to go back and gut the film from the inside out,” Ms. Ashley told 404 Media. The law, she said, “also technically makes it illegal for me to possess the original cut of my film now, which just seems completely wild, considering that it’s me who is in it.” She said restrictions on sex always hit “kink, fetish, queer and trans bodies, anything a compliance team can’t file under vanilla” first.
Melissa Todd, a writer and sex worker in Britain, said she practices breath play in her private life and offers it in sessions. “Even if you think strangulation is disgusting, immoral, dangerous, that is no reason to ban it,” she said. “Consenting adults must be allowed to do whatever they want with their own bodies.”
Groups that work on strangulation in abusive relationships welcomed the law. “There is no safe way to strangle,” Prof. Cath White, medical director of the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, said in a statement from the institute. In a report last November, the institute said 66 percent of sexually experienced respondents aged 16 to 34 had been strangled during sex. Bernie Ryan, its chief executive, said “changing the law is only one part of preventing harm.”
The act received royal assent on April 29. The pornography offenses came out of a review of online pornography regulation by Baroness Gabby Bertin, reported in 2025, and the government has said strangulation in pornography will also be a priority offense under the Online Safety Act, which puts duties on platforms.
Britain has restricted these acts before. Rules for video-on-demand services in 2014 barred a list of sexual acts, drawing a face-sitting protest outside Parliament, and the ban was overturned in 2019, 404 Media reported.
Dominatrixes have said they expect to lose income. Ms. Todd said she doesn’t upload the content she enjoys privately to sites where she could sell it, because their terms of use already bar most of it.