On October 7, 2026, the campaign group #NotYourPorn, the charity Centre for Women's Justice and law firm Leigh Day submitted a police super-complaint alleging systemic failures in how forces in England and Wales investigate image-based abuse: the taking, sharing or creating of intimate images without consent, or threatening to do so. The complaint draws on testimony from more than 100 survivors, force-level police data, frontline organisations and academic research. It will be considered jointly by the College of Policing and the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which will decide whether to open a wider investigation.

Why It Matters

Britain has spent the past two years adding offences: sharing and creating intimate deepfakes, plus the Crime and Policing Act 2026 provisions. This complaint argues that the bottleneck is enforcement rather than legislation, and a College of Policing/IOPC investigation could lead to national guidance and training standards. For platforms, cam sites, clip stores and creator services serving UK users, better policing means more law-enforcement data requests, preservation orders and takedown demands, and it adds to Ofcom's Online Safety Act duties on intimate-image abuse. Consent-verification and fast-takedown tooling, already a compliance cost, looks likely to become something police and regulators expect platforms to have. For the many adult creators whose content is leaked or re-uploaded without consent, a police service that actually investigates would be a material protection, since they are among the victims this system currently fails.

The numbers are stark. As reported by The Guardian, data from 39 forces shows charges were brought in an average of just 4.5% of image-based abuse cases last year, and in some forces fewer than 1%. Home Office figures put total charges at 569 in 2025/26. In 2025 the Revenge Porn Helpline received almost 25,000 reports, and its referrals grew more than 4,000% between 2015 and 2025. Women and girls make up 98.9% of the people in reported images. The complaint calls the policing response "fragmented, inconsistent and incapable of meeting the scale of the threat," and says new criminal offences have produced "no corresponding increase in charging rates, prosecutions or convictions."

The survivor accounts describe what that looks like in practice. Several said officers dismissed reports. One said an officer "almost giggled on the phone"; others were told "boys will be boys" or "I bet you've learned your lesson." A recurring complaint is that police leave evidence-gathering and takedown to victims, which forces them back into the content used to abuse them. Speaking to Stylist, #NotYourPorn director and co-founder Elena Michael called the current approach "clearly failing." The Centre for Women's Justice's Harriet Bland said that "without an urgent overhaul of police guidance and training on image-based abuse – which must be regularly updated – and a clear national strategy rolled out across forces, survivors will continue to be let down." The complaint also flags AI tools that let abusers generate synthetic explicit images, which adds deepfakes to the backlog police already aren't clearing.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-11

Initial entry — story first created.