The right to goon over incest porn is not a cause many politicians would rally behind. Yet this is the position Keir Starmer has bent himself towards in refusing to support a proposal that would ban portrayals of sexual activity between step-siblings — so-called “fauxcest”.
This has drawn anger even from his own benches, particularly among women MPs who are reportedly threatening to rebel and back Conservative Baroness Gabby Bertin’s amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill. One senior Labour politician told Sky News, “Once you are arguing about the detail you have lost the plot, it’s the principle,” adding, “No one wants to go through the lobby and vote for step-incest porn.”
The government’s defence is limp. Justice minister Baroness Levitt said the offence won’t include step-relationships, as while they are “controversial” they are “not illegal in real life”.
But the question is not whether fauxcest is distasteful, but whether it is harmless. There is no law prohibiting a man from consensually strangling his partner during sex, and yet such acts have now been banned in pornography. Legislators were forced to confront the gap between legality and harm as evidence mounted that what is depicted on screen shapes behaviour. Repeated surveys suggest that around half of young women have experienced strangulation during sex, a practice that was vanishingly rare until it was normalised by free and ubiquitous online pornography.
Announcing the ban last year, Minister for Victims and tackling Violence Against Women and Girls, Alex Davies-Jones, said that the depiction of strangulation during sex had “real life consequences for women.”
“Cracking down on the appalling rise of strangulation pornography will protect women and send a clear signal to men and boys that misogyny will not be tolerated.”
Yet the depiction of sex between step-parents and their children, or step-siblings, apparently doesn’t influence behaviour? Let’s be clear, step-incest is a wildly popular category. The ruse of “step” might appear in titles, but it is dropped as readily as underwear in films themselves. Go to any mainstream pornography site now you will see titles on the landing page which refer to sex between relatives. Producers market it explicitly as taboo, with slogans like “When it’s wrong, but it feels so right” and tags and titles that refer to sex that is “forbidden”, “crossing the line”, “keeping it in the family”. Some will have hundreds of thousands of views — an order of magnitude more, alas, than will ever read an article like this critiquing pornography.
The use of pornography in grooming is well documented
The pornographic machine is engineered to tear through every scruple and sexual boundary in the pursuit of users’ attention. It exploits the most primitive parts of the brain, short-circuiting the social and moral codes that ordinarily keep behaviour in check. As these pathways are reinforced, users become desensitised, disinhibited, and a risk not only to themselves but to others.
The use of pornography in grooming is well documented. The Epstein Files offer a chilling illustration of how pornography functions as an abuser’s training manual. In one exchange, Epstein instructs a schoolgirl to watch Pornhub “like a school project”, explicitly using pornography as a form of sexual training. Elsewhere, emails discuss young women being prepared for him in chillingly managerial terms: “Kid will come to the house straight from Frederic with iPad portfolio. Done with Pornhub introduction.”
Porn works on victims and abusers alike. It normalises the aberrant and grants a kind of permission for acts that would otherwise be unthinkable. A girl abused by a stepbrother can be shown a screen full of similar scenes and told that “everyone does it”. However frightened she is, the message is that she should accept it. Any flicker of doubt he might feel is smothered by the same logic: others share the desire, so it cannot be wrong.
The government is perfectly willing to police speech on social media for fear it might incite real world harm. Yet when it comes to pornography, it suddenly pretends we are dealing with something sealed off from reality, a kind of moral vacuum where nothing watched has consequences. It is the modern equivalent of dismissing domestic abuse as a “private matter”.
But this is a comforting lie the government itself is already beginning to abandon. In banning pornography depicting strangulation, it accepted that porn does not merely reflect behaviour, it shapes it. So why the sudden squeamishness about fauxcest? It ought to be the easiest call a politician could make.
No one defending incest or step pornography has been able to articulate a positive case for it. Not one. When challenged, they retreat into the usual evasions: “free speech”, cries of moral panic, or personal abuse. But pornography is not speech in any meaningful sense. It offers no social benefits. What is being defended is the rank entitlement to consume material that normalises abuse, carrying consequences far beyond the screen.
Starmer’s hesitation over Baroness Bertin’s amendment is not about a lack of evidence. It is about a lack of spine. No one seriously believes incest porn is a social good. No one can explain why it deserves protection. And if politicians cannot even bring themselves to oppose something so obviously corrosive, the problem is not complexity or principle. It is cowardice.
