The Crime and Policing Act 2026 and ABDL
I have been asked several times about the “new law” in the UK that’s “banning ABDL” – if you’re reading this you’ve probably seen it too and you may well be wondering where that leaves us as a community. From what we’ve read so far, the answer is that the ABDL community and its members isn’t the target and, unusually, the government has said so in writing, using an adult in a nappy pretending to be a baby as its example of what the new offence doesn’t catch.
That’s reassuring, though it isn’t quite the whole story. The offence came into force in England and Wales on 6 November (section 107 of the Crime and Policing Act 2026, if you want to look it up), it carries prison time, and the UK has never given anyone an automatic right to publish adult content, which matters more here than people might expect.
A word of honesty before going further: we’re not lawyers. This is our reading of public government documents, put together to help the community make sense of where the line sits. It isn’t legal advice, and if you make, sell or host adult content and you’re not sure where you stand, please talk to a solicitor.
What the offence actually covers
It’s now a crime to possess or publish an image only where every one of these is true:
The image is pornographic, meaning it can reasonably be assumed to have been made solely or mainly for sexual arousal.
It shows two people engaged in sexual activity, explicitly and realistically. 3 A reasonable person looking at it would think the people in it are real.
A reasonable person, taking into account any sound or information that comes with the image, would think one of them is under 16, or pretending to be under 16.
Fall short on any one and the offence isn’t made out. The maximums are three years for possession and five for publication, and “publish” is drawn wide – posting, uploading, sending or sharing with anyone at all. Possession is treated as a continuing act too, so anything still held after 6 November counts, whenever it was saved.
It’s also a priority offence under the Online Safety Act 2023, which puts platforms under a legal duty to go looking for this material and take it down. We’ll come back to why that’s the part that worries us most.
Paragraph 65
The most useful document here isn’t the Act but the human rights (ECHR) memorandum the government published alongside the amendment on 10 April 2026. Paragraph 65 reads, in full:
The offences carve out pornographic images where it is fanciful or ridiculous that the person in the image is a child under the age of 16 in the way pretended. For example, a pornographic image where an adult dresses in a nappy and pretends to be a baby will not be caught. Such behaviour is not illegal in real life and is about regression and humiliation, not the sexualisation of children. The offence is also not intended to criminalise a pornographic image of someone who is clearly an adult where the only marker of childhood is the fact that he or she is in school uniform. This limitation ensures the offence is the least restrictive way of addressing the legitimate aims.
Crime and Policing Bill: ECHR supplementary memorandum, 10 April 2026, paragraph 65
It’s striking to see a government paper name the nappy example outright, and to describe ABDL as being about regression and humiliation rather than the sexualisation of children – that’s a distinction the community has been making for years, and it’s worth having on the record. The school uniform line matters as well, since it shows the drafters thought about costume as a marker of childhood and decided it wasn’t enough on its own.
The caveat (and it’s a real one) is that paragraph 65 is the government explaining its reasoning. The Act contains the “fanciful” test; the nappy example lives in the memorandum, and while courts can look at material like this when working out what Parliament meant, each case still gets decided on its own facts.
Realistic and believable, or fanciful
Everything turns on believability. Paragraph 42 of the memorandum puts it like this:
…the persons are not to be taken as pretending to be under 16 if it is fanciful that they are actually under 16 in the way pretended.
Crime and Policing Bill: ECHR supplementary memorandum, 10 April 2026, paragraph 42
So what matters is whether a reasonable person could look at the image and believe they were seeing a real child.
A grown adult in a nappy playing at being a baby doesn’t come close; nobody mistakes it for an infant, and the government’s own example says as much. What the offence is aimed at is explicit, realistic sexual content where someone is presented in a way that could pass for a child under 16, which the memorandum describes as material that mimics child sexual abuse material.
It gets less tidy in two places. The reasonable person doesn’t only look at the picture but takes in the sound and information that comes with it, so a caption, title, tag or line of dialogue giving a young age can tip something ambiguous over the line. And the clearest safe example is a baby – role play pitched at a school-age child sits a good deal nearer to what the law is after, because it’s easier to find believable. Age-regression personas aren’t all equal in the law’s eyes, whatever they feel like from the inside.
The guard rails
On top of the four conditions and the fanciful carve-out, the Act builds in defences. For each one the burden is on the defendant to prove it, on the balance of probabilities.
You took part in the act shown, it was consensual, it didn’t involve serious harm, and nobody in it was actually under 16. That covers keeping your own content, and sharing it with the other people who took part – nobody else.
You hadn’t seen the image and had no reason to suspect what it was.
It was sent to you without your asking and you didn’t hang on to it for an unreasonable time (this one only applies to possession).
You had a legitimate reason, such as research, journalism, moderation or legal work.
Scenes inside a BBFC-classified film are excluded from the publication offence too, unless they’ve been lifted out of the film for sexual purposes.
There’s no automatic right to publish
This is probably the bit most worth repeating. The UK has nothing like the US First Amendment – freedom of expression reaches us through Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and it’s a qualified right, which means the state can restrict it where the law says so and it’s judged necessary, with protecting morals and preventing crime among the accepted reasons.
The memorandum doesn’t dodge this. It accepts that stopping people publishing content of themselves pretending to be a child restricts their expression, artistic expression included, and then concludes that the restriction is justified. So where content falls inside the offence, even something you made yourself with a consenting partner can only go to the people who were in it.
Whether something is legal to do and whether it’s legal to post are separate questions, then. ABDL scenes between adults is lawful. Putting sexual content of it online brings in this offence, the Obscene Publications Act, the Online Safety Act and whatever a platform’s own rules happen to say that week.
Where it could go wrong
We think the intent here is clear and, broadly, fair. Legislation has a habit of landing differently from how it was drafted, though, and a few things concern us.
Platforms are the big one. As a priority offence under the Online Safety Act this comes with a duty to find and remove content proactively, and automated moderation doesn’t read paragraph 65 – so we’d expect perfectly lawful ABDL content, including posts with nothing sexual in them at all, to be flagged, taken down or quietly buried, and some accounts to vanish, as platforms decide that caution is cheaper than nuance.
The “reasonable person” is a judgement call, and what looks obviously fanciful to anyone in the community may not look that way to a police officer or a jury who’ve never come across ABDL before. Nobody yet knows where “believable” begins for role play pitched at older ages; that’ll only become clear when real cases reach court. Images also get reposted without the captions that marked them as fantasy, or with new ones that change what they say.
Then there’s the headline problem. Reports about banning “adults roleplaying as children” will leave some people assuming the whole of ABDL is now illegal. It isn’t, and the government’s own paper says so, but we suspect the community will be making that point for a while yet.
If you’re not sure
Being ABDL isn’t illegal, and nothing in this Act changes that. If you make or share sexual content, though, it’s worth looking hard at anything that leans on a stated young age or a school-age persona – and at the words travelling with your images as much as the images themselves. If you’re genuinely unsure – and we are thinking about content creators rather than casual community posters here, but this advice stands for all, ask a solicitor and seek advice before you post rather than after.
Sources
Crime and Policing Bill: ECHR supplementary memorandum, 10 April 2026 (Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Department for Transport). Paragraphs 41–85; paragraph 65 quoted under the Open Government Licence v3.0. gov.uk
Crime and Policing Act 2026: Offences relating to pornography (Ministry of Justice guidance, 16 October 2026). gov.uk
MOJ circular: Child abduction and pornography offences (commencement of section 107, 6 November 2026). gov.uk
