LONDON — The U.K. Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Commercial Sexual Exploitation has published a report in which it calls for banning adult livestreaming platforms.
Currently, the U.K.’s Online Safety Act treats livestreaming in the same way as other adult content, subject to scrutiny by media regulator Ofcom.
Titled “Only Exploitation,” the report condemns this approach. The report argues that webcamming platforms perpetrate harms against women and children, that their live, interactive nature carries unique risks, that they financially incentivize sexual exploitation and abuse, and that they cannot be made “safe.”
It recommends that Parliament outlaw commercial livestreaming platforms as well as “e-pimping,” a term it uses to describe individuals facilitating or profiting from livestreaming of pornographic performances by another person.
The report characterizes paying a cammer to engage in sex acts with another person as “prostitution,” echoing Sweden’s 2025 ban on purchasing sexual services performed remotely by streamers and custom content creators. A similar measure was proposed in the French National Assembly earlier this year, but failed to advance.
All-Party Parliamentary Groups are informal caucuses of members of Parliament focusing on specific issues. The nonprofit advocacy organization UK Feminista serves as the Secretariat of the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, providing administrative and organizational support, and is credited with providing research and resources for the report.
MP Tracy Gilbert, who chairs the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, called webcamming platforms “a form of commercial sexual exploitation.”
“The level of risk and severity of harms attached to their activities is unacceptable,” Gilbert said. “We are urging the Government to confront online sex trafficking and sexual exploitation by outlawing e-pimping and preventing commercial online platforms from live-streaming pornography and prostitution.”
The report asserts that the risk of being subject to sexual coercion in webcamming is “acute.”
“The webcamming trade acts as a magnet for exploiters,” the report states. “Individuals and organisations keen to profit off men paying women to perform personalised pornography coerce young women into the trade, control their activities and threaten them if they attempt to leave.”
Such coercion, the report contends, can come from agencies, managers, studios and viewers.
“The sexual coercion can come in the form of pressure, manipulation, deception or force,” the report reads. “It can result in women performing sexual acts on camera that they do not want to do, and feeling (or being) unable to leave or say no to sexual requests and demands.”
The report also calls webcamming platforms a “stepping stone” to offline sexual exploitation, and argues that livestreamed content “cannot be pre-screened to check for the inclusion of criminal offences — including child sexual exploitation.”
Apart from the issue of livestreaming, the report also calls for Parliament to require all sites accessible in the U.K. to enable individuals who appear in adult content to withdraw their consent to its continued publication, at any time and for any reason. Such a provision, which would have invalidated talent contracts, was originally included in the Crime and Policing Bill enacted earlier this year but failed to make it into the final law.
In lieu of that provision, an amendment required the Secretary of State to conduct an overall review of sites’ age and consent verification procedures and then present the results to Parliament within a year. The law also gives the Secretary of State new powers to intervene on this issue and potentially regulate sites’ age and consent verification duties without further authorization by Parliament.
The report calls upon Parliament to enact that provision “to its fullest without delay.”
