The Women and Equalities Committee called on the government this week to amend the Crime and Policing Bill currently going through Parliament in order to create the offence. It warned this is necessary to force online platforms to delete the images—according to the Revenge Porn Helpline, about 10% of NCII are not removed and continue to be accessible in the UK, often hosted on sites based overseas including some dedicated to NCII abuse.
Currently, the Online Safety Act 2023 creates criminal offences related to the making and sharing of NCII. It gives Ofcom powers to impose fines and order services to take material down.
However, Ofcom’s powers are slow, says Sarah Owen MP, the committee’s chair, and ‘a legal gap remains. NCII can circulate online years after the image was first posted’.
As well as criminalising possession, the committee’s report, ‘Tackling non-consensual intimate image abuse’, published this week, calls for the establishment of an Online Safety Commission. This would be a statutory body akin to the eSafety Commission in Australia, with a focus on support for individuals. The commission would act on behalf of individuals who report NCII content, applying for and sending court orders demanding websites take down content or requiring perpetrators to pay compensation for harm caused.
Owen said: ‘The committee heard shocking evidence of [NCII’s] scale and impact, with a tenfold increase in just four years and more than 22,000 reported cases in 2024.
‘There is also an urgent need for courts to confiscate devices storing NCII content. There have been cases where, following the criminal justice process, perpetrators have had devices containing the NCII returned to them. This is harrowing for victims.’
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