Policy paper

Crime and Policing Act 2026: intimate image abuse factsheet

Updated 30 September 2026

What are we going to do?

Measures in the Act will:

• Extend the time limit for prosecuting summary-only intimate image offences from six months to a period that is both within three years of the commission of the offence and within six months of the date when the prosecutor had sufficient evidence to prosecute.
• Create a new offence to criminalise copying without consent, or reasonable belief in consent, an intimate image that was only shared temporarily. This will sit alongside the other intimate image abuse offences.
• Introduce a new criminal offence that criminalises the making, supplying or offering to supply a thing for use as intimate image generators, often known as nudification apps. These tools enable individuals to create fake intimate images and videos of a person without consent.
• Place new duties on online platforms to ensure that their systems and processes take down non-consensual intimate images (NCII) as soon as reasonably practical and no later than 48 hours after receiving a report. In the most serious cases, failure to comply with an Ofcom enforcement decision on NCII takedowns can lead to criminal liability for senior managers.
• Enable courts to make an image deletion order following a conviction for an offence relating to intimate image abuse, breastfeeding voyeurism, or the sharing of semen-defaced images. Failure to comply with the order will be a criminal offence.
• Introduce powers for the Secretary of State to establish and maintain a secure UK registry of hashes of verified non-consensual intimate images to prevent the uploading and re-circulation of NCII content.
• Create a criminal offence of sharing a semen-defaced image of another person without their consent or reasonable belief in consent.

How are we going to do it?

Time limits for prosecution of Intimate Image Abuse summary-only offences

Under section 127(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, prosecution for summary-only offences must be brought within 6 months of the offence being committed. The Act creates an exception so that the time limits for prosecuting the following summary-only intimate image offences is extended to a period that is both within three years of the commission of the offence and within six months of the date when the prosecutor had sufficient evidence to prosecute: sharing, taking or recording an intimate image without consent or reasonable belief in consent; installing equipment with intent to enable a taking offence; and copying without consent an intimate image shared temporarily.

This aligns with the extended time limit for the offences of creating, or requesting the creation of, a deepfake intimate image, ensuring consistency across intimate image abuse offences.

Copying without consent an intimate image shared temporarily

The Act creates a new offence of copying an intimate image that has been shared only temporarily without consent, or reasonable belief in consent. This will be inserted into the Sexual Offences Act 2003, sitting alongside all other intimate image offences and, wherever relevant, mirroring them. For example, it uses the same definition of “intimate image” as all other intimate image offences. The maximum penalty for the offence is imprisonment for a term not exceeding the maximum term for summary offences (currently 6 months), or a fine, or both. There will be a defence where someone had a reasonable excuse for creating the copy, for example, capturing evidence of an offence for the purposes of sharing it with the police.

Supply of nudification tools or apps

The ban on intimate image generators captures tools which are made or supplied for use as a generator of intimate images. This will capture such tools in all their forms, including but not limited to nudification apps, websites, nudification bots used on social media channels such as Telegram, and AI models.

The developers and those who supply or offer to supply these tools will be criminally liable and face up to 3 years in prison and/ or an unlimited fine. In order to protect tools which are made for use as a generator of consensual intimate images, such as those used in surgical settings a defence is available where a person can prove that they took all reasonable steps to prevent the generator’s misuse to create, or facilitate the creation of, non-consensual intimate images. To benefit from the defence, a defendant would need to prove that they took every reasonable precaution to avoid non-consensual use. The Government has purposely employed a reverse burden of proof and the high threshold for establishing the defence in order to prevent misuse.

Additionally, the new criminal offence will allow Government to tackle the accessibility of such tools via the Online Safety Act. Once the offence becomes law, under the Online Safety Act’s illegal content duties, social media sites will have to take down content that offers nudification tools and search engines will have to reduce the visibility of search results linked to these tools, regardless of where the social media, search, or nudification service is based. This will significantly limit their accessibility to users in the UK.

48h hour take down

The Act amends the Online Safety Act 2023 to introduce new duties requiring regulated online platforms to operate proportionate systems and processes to ensure the timely removal of non-consensual intimate image content. Services will be required to take down intimate image content that is reported by the subject of the image, or by a person acting on their behalf, as soon as is reasonably practicable and in any event within 48 hours of receiving a valid report. In addition, services must take steps to prevent users from encountering the same, or substantially the same, content.

The measures also require services to provide clear and accessible reporting routes so that victims can submit an intimate image content report with sufficient information to identify the content, and to operate expedited complaints procedures where reported content is not removed. These duties apply where services are satisfied that the content reported constitutes intimate image content and that the report has been made by, or on behalf of, the subject of the image. The requirements are risk-based and proportionate, taking account of the size and nature of the service. Ofcom has strong powers to enforce compliance with these duties. In the most serious cases, failure to comply with an Ofcom enforcement decision on NCII takedowns can lead to criminal liability for senior managers.

Deletion orders

The Act amends the Sentencing Code to create a new image deletion order which will enable courts to require offenders to delete and destroy all copies of an image related to a specified offence, and any other relevant images of the same victim. This order will be available upon conviction for an intimate image abuse offence, breastfeeding voyeurism and the offence of sharing of semen-defaced images. The court will be required to give reasons if it declines to make a deletion order in a case where it is available.

Breach of the order is a separate criminal offence itself, carrying a maximum penalty of up to 5 years’ imprisonment.

Intimate image abuse registry and hashing

The Act will introduce a duty on the Secretary of State to designate a ‘trusted flagger’ for non-consensual intimate image (NCII) content. This will provide statutory recognition and government backing to a trusted source of NCII hashes. The Secretary of State may also make regulations requiring platforms to share hashes of NCII content with the those designated as the trusted flagger.

It will also confer a power to the Secretary of State to make further provisions about a register of NCII hashes. A Government scoping exercise will assess how a register could most effectively operate, including considering technical capabilities and verification processes.

Sharing semen-defaced images

The Act creates a new offence of sharing a semen-defaced image without consent, or reasonable belief in consent, of the person depicted. This will capture real images as well as AI. The offence will be inserted into the Sexual Offences Act 2003. It is not intimate image abuse, as the victim is not always in an intimate state, and so will sit separately to intimate image abuse offences. The time limit for prosecution will be extended from six months to a period that is both within three years of the commission of the offence and within six months of the date when the prosecutor had sufficient evidence to prosecute.

The maximum penalty for the offence is imprisonment for a term not exceeding the maximum term for summary offences (currently 6 months), or a fine, or both. There will be a defence where someone had a reasonable excuse for sharing the semen-defaced image. This might be needed for law enforcement purposes; for journalistic purposes; or to support victims – for example, finding an image and sharing with the victim so they can decide what to do.

Background

Time limits for prosecution of intimate image abuse summary-only offences (Clause 98 and Schedule 13)

Under section 127(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, prosecution for summary only offences must be brought within 6 months of the offence being committed. However, the nature of intimate image abuse means that victims and prosecutors may be unaware until after this time limit for prosecution has passed. It cannot be right that victims of these abhorrent crimes are denied justice in this way.

The Government has already acted to extend the time limit for the summary only offences of creating or requesting the creation of a purported intimate image without consent or reasonable belief in consent, when they were introduced into the Sexual Offences Act 2003 by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.

The change in this Act builds on that, making sure that all remaining summary-only intimate image offences – both existing, and within this Act – have the same extended time limit for prosecutors to seek justice for victims.

Copying without consent an intimate image shared temporarily (Clause 98 and Schedule 13)

The Act includes a package of offences to criminalise taking or recording an intimate image of a victim without their consent or reasonable belief in consent. These offences protect victims where intimate images are taken or recorded of them, that would not otherwise exist.

However, victims whose temporarily shared intimate images have been copied without their consent, can experience harms comparable to those suffered by victims whose intimate images have been taken or recorded without their consent. Consent to view a person in an intimate state temporarily is not consent to view permanently. The taking of screenshots or copies of these temporarily shared images is a gross violation of privacy that cannot be tolerated. The Government is criminalising screenshots like this to ensure people, particularly women and girls, retain control over images temporarily shared. Technology is evolving and this Government will make sure our laws are modern and evolve with it.

Supply of nudification tools or apps (Clause 99)

The nudification tool ban will be the first of its kind in the world and will target the developers and suppliers who profit from the profound distress and victimisation of others, particularly women and girls.

This new offence will complement the existing offences in Section 66 of the Sexual Offences Act, which prohibits individuals from creating, requesting, sharing or threatening to share intimate images made without consent or a reasonable belief in consent.

In addition to banning intimate image generators, the Government has also taken powers in the Crime and Policing Act which will enable government to bring currently unregulated chatbots into scope of the Online Safety Act and require them to protect their users from illegal content and to prevent their services being exploited for criminal activity – including non-consensual intimate images.

The Government has also strengthened the Online Safety Act to make the intimate image abuse offences priority offences, requiring in-scope services to prevent it appearing online in the first place and swiftly remove it if it does.

48 hour take down (Clauses 100 and 101)

The continued sharing and reposting of non-consensual intimate images causes ongoing and compounding harm to victims, often requiring them to repeatedly locate and report the same images across multiple platforms. While existing criminal offences already prohibit the creation and sharing of NCII, victims have consistently reported that delays in removal allow images to spread rapidly online, prolonging trauma and distress.

The 48-hour takedown requirement is therefore designed to ensure that, once reported by a victim or their representative, swift and consistent action is taken to remove intimate images and to limit their further circulation. This measure is intended to operate alongside anticipated regulatory action by Ofcom on the use of hash-matching to detect and prevent the reuploading of NCII, as well as the new provisions in the Act enabling the establishment of a non-consensual intimate image (NCII) registry.

Taken together, these measures build on and complement existing duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 by strengthening the system for rapid removal, preventing redistribution, and reducing the need for victims to repeatedly re-report the same content online.

Deletion orders (Clause 102)

Under section 153 of the Sentencing Code, courts have the power to make deprivation orders on conviction, including in cases of intimate image abuse. The effect of these orders, which are the main available vehicle to deprive offenders of images and the devices they are held on, is to remove the offender’s rights to the relevant property.

However, reports suggest that deprivation orders are not consistently made in intimate image abuse cases. This may be for a variety of reasons, including the practical limitations of using deprivation orders in the intimate image context.

The creation of a bespoke image deletion order is intended to address this gap, enabling the courts to order the offender to take steps to delete and destroy relevant image(s) related to a specified offence in the offender’s possession or control, and any other relevant images of the same victim

Intimate image abuse registry and hashing (Clause 103)

The sharing and re-circulation of NCII online can cause prolonged trauma for victims, who often have to track and re-report images across multiple platforms. In 2024 , the Revenge Porn Helpline reported a 90.9% a removal rate of NCII content reported to it^{[footnote 1]}. However, challenges remain in removing the remaining images that continue to be shared online without consent.

The powers introduced in this Act will enable the Government to provide statutory underpinning to an NCII register for information purposes, while also allowing further provisions to be made about a register. A scoping exercise will take place to consider how a register could operate.

Sharing semen-defaced images (Clause 98 and Schedule 13)

Semen images depict the photo of a victim, usually a woman, with semen or something that appears to be semen on or next to the image. AI can also be used to make it look like semen has been deposited on the image. It is a deplorable behaviour designed to degrade and humiliate the woman in the picture. The devastating rise of ‘semen images’ is alarming - and testament to just why this government is cracking down firmly on image-based abuse.

Like intimate image abuse, the nature of offending around semen-defaced images means that victims and prosecutors may be unaware an image has been shared until after the standard time limit for prosecution of summary only offences (6 months) has passed. It cannot be right that victims of these abhorrent crimes are denied justice in this way. That is why the offence will have an extended time limit for prosecution, mirroring the intimate image abuse offences.

Key statistics

Research by My Image, My Choice^{[footnote 2]} showed that two of the largest nudification services alone received a combined 13 million visits in January 2024 alone. One nudification service, Undress.ai processed 600,000 photos in the first 21 days after it launched. Although data are limited, this demonstrates scale, growth, and significant potential for victimisation.

2% of adult internet users reported encountering sharing of, or threats to share, intimate images without consent (e.g. ‘revenge porn), in a four week period. Across the country this would equate to approximately 1.1 million people.

In 2024, the Revenge Porn Helpline provided support in 22,275 cases of reported NCII, which was a 20.9% increase from the year prior^{[footnote 3]}. However, the scale of NCII is liekly to be vastly underreported; many victims may be unaware that images of them are being shared without consent, or that previously removed material is being re-circulated online and across multiple platforms. Reflecting this, analysis by the Revenge Porn Helpline estimates that approximately 3.18 million NCII are shared online each year^{[footnote 4]}.

Frequently asked questions

Time limits for prosecution of intimate image abuse summary-only offences (Clause 98 and Schedule 13)

Why have you not extended the time limit for the more serious intimate image offences?

There is no time limit for the more serious offences, where the perpetrator has acted with intent to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation, or for the purpose of sexual gratification. These offences are triable either way, and not subject to the time limits for summary only offences.

Copying without consent an intimate image shared temporarily (Clause 98 and Schedule 13)

Why didn’t you just include taking screenshots in the “taking” offences?

We did not include them in the taking offences because we did not want to include only videocalls, as recommended by the Law Commission.

We wanted to include screenshotting or copying of any image temporarily shared by the victim. This is different to simply “taking” and so required its own offence.

Regardless of where the offence is placed, what is important is what it criminalises. This offence is a core part of the overall intimate images package, wherever relevant, it mirrors the other intimate image offences to ensure consistency.

Why limit the offence to images shared temporarily?

This is about consent. When a person sends an image permanently, creating a copy does not violate the victim’s privacy, because the recipient already had permanent access to the image. A broader offence would also criminalise any form of copying – such as your phone automatically creating copies in the cloud of images other people had sent you permanently.

The situation is very different where the image has been shared only temporarily. Copies made under these circumstances without consent do violate the victim’s privacy because they did not consent to the recipient having permanent access to that image.

Supply of nudification tools or apps (Clause 99)

What is the government doing to address AI-generated non-consensual intimate images (NCII) and nudification tools?

The Government has introduced a comprehensive package to tackle the proliferation of demeaning and demeaning non-consensual sexual deepfakes, including the ban on intimate image generators, often known as nudification apps.

This ban criminalise making, supplying, or offering to supply a tool or service for use as a generator of non-consensual intimate images.

The Government is clear that action is also required to tackle the generation of non-consensual sexual deepfakes on general purpose AI tools. This is why the Government has taken a power in the Crime and Policing Act to enable Government to close gaps in the Online Safety Act and bring unregulated chatbots into scope of the Act’s illegal content duties.

This will require AI chatbots to put in place effective measures to protect people from illegal content and to prevent their services facilitating criminal activity, including creating or sharing non-consensual sexual deepfakes and child sexual abuse material.

This will capture tools that have a significant number of UK users, that target the UK market, or that present a risk of significant harm to individuals in the UK, regardless of where in the world the company is based.

What are the potential factors to consider in assessing if a tool or service is made or supplied for use as a generator of purported intimate images?

The test is whether a reasonable person, having regard to all the circumstances, would consider that something is made or supplied for creating or facilitating the creation of purported intimate images of a person. Factors which may influence this assessment could include:

• The functional capabilities of the tool or service.

• advertising of the tool or service, particularly concerning the possibility of purported intimate image generation without or irrespective of the consent of the person depicted.

• instructions and manuals accompanying the tool or service

• text and pictures accompanying the tool or service.

• autofill suggestions or suggested prompts or other factors which make it more likely that the tool or service will create a particular type of image.

• the presence or absence of safeguards against the creation of intimate images of without the consent of the person depicted.

• the past use of the tool or service, whether or not under the same name or branding, and any relevant changes to the thing or service.

48 hour take down (Clauses 100 and 101)

How does this relate to the Online Safety Act?

These measures amend the Online Safety Act 2023 to introduce specific and time‑bound duties in relation to removal of reported non-consensual intimate image content. Platforms are already required to assess and mitigate illegal harms; this provision strengthens those duties for NCII by requiring systems and processes designed to remove such content within a defined period.

Does this apply to all intimate images online?

The duty applies only to content that amounts to an offence under section 66B of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (sharing intimate images without consent), and where a valid report is made by the subject or someone acting on their behalf.

What happens if a platform does not comply?

Ofcom will oversee compliance with these duties as part of its enforcement role under the Online Safety Act. Where platforms fail to comply, Ofcom has strong powers to take enforcement action, including financial penalties and taking action ot hold tech executives criminally liable.

Does this replace criminal enforcement?

No. These are regulatory duties designed to ensure rapid removal of harmful content online. Criminal offences relating to intimate image abuse will continue to be enforced by the police and courts.

Deletion orders (Clause 102)

Will this Deletion Order include deletion of cloud-storage?

Yes. This new Deletion Order will require the deletion and destruction of all copies of an intimate image in the defendant’s possession or control upon conviction of an intimate image offence, including images saved in cloud-storage and automatic photo-saving that the defendant still has possession or control of.

Will this Deletion Order include deletion of content online?

The defendant will be required to delete and destroy images within their possession or control which does extend to images they have posted/shared online of the victim where they have the power to take it down.

It does not extend to ordering online platforms to delete images themselves because if they are hosting intimate images without consent then they are already subject to duties under the Online Safety Act. Ofcom, as the regulator, has enforcement powers to require removal of illegal content and can take action against services that fail to comply.

Intimate image abuse registry and hashing (Clause 103)

What is the scope of the scoping exercise? How long will it take?

We expect the scoping exercise to take around six months. Key considerations will include:

• How and when NCII content is verified;
• The level of regulatory oversight required;
• Existing legal principles and the online safety landscape;
• What technical infrastructure would be required; and
• What mechanisms would be needed for managing misuse, including malicious reporting and appeals.

Sharing semen-defaced images (Clause 98 and Schedule 13)

Are images that show a person with semen on their body covered by the intimate image offences?

Yes. An image that shows a person with semen on their body, even if they are fully clothed, can already be covered by the intimate image offences, given most instances would in all likelihood be considered to show or appear to show the person engaging in a sexual act.

Why haven’t you included sharing semen-defaced images in the intimate image offences?

Semen-defaced images that depict the victim in an intimate state are already potentially covered by the intimate image offences. Semen-defaced images are also deeply harmful, but they are not about whether the victim is in an intimate state – in fact in many the victim is fully clothed.

This different behaviour requires a different offence. What is important is that it is criminal and can be prosecuted successfully – including alongside intimate image or other offences.

1. Revenge Porn Helpline (2024). Revenge Porn Helpline 2024 Report. ↩

2. My Image My Choice (February 2024,). ‘Deepfake abuse: Landscape Analysis’, slide 4 ↩

3. Revenge Porn Helpline (2024). Revenge Porn Helpline 2024 Report. ↩

4. SWGfL (12 March 2025). ‘The Scale of non-consensual intimate image abuse: A data drive global analysis’ ↩