Member

Amendment 300A goes on to address a fundamental legal loophole. The law currently allows an adult to mimic a child in pornographic content and for that content to remain lawful online. This amendment would close that loophole, updating the Protection of Children Act 1978 and extending the offence of making an indecent photograph of a child to pornographic material that depicts a child when that role is being played by an adult. This content is known as “barely legal” and is marketed as such. At present, the law covers only indecent images of actual children or pseudo-photographs. Pseudo-photographs are where an image is digitally modified to appear as a child. It does not cover adults pretending to be children and mimicking child sexual abuse. We have the strange situation of rightly prohibiting an AI-generated video depicting sexual activity with young-looking girls on the basis that it normalises and promotes child sexual abuse, but not a very similar video of real actors who just look very young, as is the case in online pornography.