Porn regulations coming into effect on 6th November will criminalise those making and sharing porn media which shows actors choking one another, acting as under-16s, or pretending to be related. These are likely to hit deep in a porn market where “step-mom” remained the 11th most popular search category on Porn Hub last year, and choking continues to feature in ~4% of porn films.

Possession of this media will risk up to three years jail time, while publication will carry a maximum sentence of five years. Pro-regulation MPs justify these high penalties by referencing the risk of young people learning harmful sexual practices from watching these types of porn. Jess Asoto, MP, contended “pornography is not just entertainment; it has become a form of education”.

The idea that young people integrate sexual behaviours viewed in porn into real-life practice is well-researched. A recent University of Melbourne study found more than 60% percent of the young people sampled had watched choking in porn, while over half of the same sample had experienced choking during sex.

These new laws come in just over a year after age-verification regulations were introduced, which were designed to restrict under-18s access to porn. So, should we take the parliamentary push for these new laws as an acknowledgement that the so-called “strong age checks” have failed?

That these checks are not effective is not news to British porn-watchers and Reddit-users, who have known since moments after the laws were introduced last July how easy they are to bypass and how accessible non-regulated sites are.

The government’s seeming awareness of the difficulties in the roll-out of age-verification may signal upcoming attempts to increase motivations for porn websites to implement the change. So far this awareness seems only to have manifested in new regulations on content, rather than access.

Ian Henderson, founder of porn harms charity the Naked Truth Project, told us: “We cannot rely on banning certain categories of content … in the hope that it will go away. We need to go much further upstream, with better education across society … about the harms of pornography in the digital age.”

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