Member

On Amendment 297AA, I remain grateful to Ministers for the government amendment addressing incest, but I am mystified why it does not include step-incest. In 2024, 4.1 billion videos viewed on Pornhub featured incest-related scenarios, including step-incest. Section 27 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 is clear that nearly all step-relations between step-parents and step-siblings are illegal. This is because Parliament recognised the clear power imbalance in stepfamily relationships within households and acted—step-relations are the most likely relationships in which child sexual abuse takes place. In fact, in the UK around half of all sexual abuse cases against children are perpetrated by a step-parent. Yet the depiction of this type of pornography allows porn companies to profit from content that depicts something that is utterly illegal in the UK. I do not know whether the Government realise this.