The crime bill proposes a stronger model of consent – and with violent imagery and child sexual abuse soaring, who, really, can argue against it?
Susanna Rustin is the author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism
Once you stop to think about it, the need for a law to ensure that participants have consented to appear in online pornography is obvious.
Egregious past failures have been well documented. They range from the New York Times’s investigation of Pornhub, which concluded that one of the world’s biggest pornography businesses hosted videos featuring underaged and sex-trafficked subjects (Pornhub subsequently removed more than half of its content) to the horrors uncovered in the trial of Dominique Pelicot. On the online chat site Coco he shared multiple videos of his then wife, Gisèle, being raped while unconscious in a chatroom called “without her knowledge” (Coco was shut down in 2024).
Susanna Rustin is a social affairs journalist and the author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism
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