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Newsletter #9—December 2025
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Drawing the Line Watchlist 2025
This month's newsletter is devoted to the release of the Drawing the Line Watchlist 2025, COSL's flagship research publication for the year. The Watchlist examines where legal and policy frameworks risk conflating real image-based sexual abuse with fictional, artistic, or synthetic expression — and why that distinction is critical.
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The Watchlist highlights jurisdictions where overly broad definitions may overwhelm reporting systems, divert resources from identifying and protecting real victims, and create unintended consequences for privacy, free expression, and marginalized communities. Drawing on legal analysis, emerging research, and expert insight, the report underscores a central finding: increased reporting volume does not necessarily lead to increased protection.
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Launched during a December 10 public webinar, the Watchlist also looks ahead, outlining future work that will expand beyond country-level analysis to examine platform practices, enforcement trends, and prevention-focused approaches.
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The Latest from Our Blog
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Visit the Website donate to our fundraiser The Drawing the Line Between Personal Expression and Lived Abuse program addresses a growing and consequential failure in contemporary lawmaking: the deliberate erosion of distinctions between fictional sexual expression and real-world sexual harm. Across multiple jurisdictions, legislators and regulators are increasingly collapsing fictional, artistic, and narrative depictions into the same legal and moral category as …
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https://youtu.be/slqwNJQnkd0 This webinar held on 10 December 2025 was for the the global launch of the Drawing the Line Watchlist—a groundbreaking report examining how ten countries around the world are increasingly blurring the line between personal expression (art, fiction, advocacy, consensual adult material) and lived abuse involving real victims. Joined by three members of the project’s Advisory Board—Emma Shapiro, Ashley …
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Beyond the Filter: Drawing the Line Watchlist
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In this special edition of Beyond the Filter, hosts Brandy Brightman and Jeremy Malcolm present the global launch of the Drawing the Line Watchlist—a groundbreaking report examining how ten countries around the world are increasingly blurring the line between personal expression (art, fiction, advocacy, consensual adult material) and lived abuse involving real victims. Joined by three members of the project’s …
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Drawing the line: When child safety laws lose sight of real children
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Child safety, more than any other policy issue, has come to define the outer limits of internet regulation. No other policy frame carries such moral weight or such potential for misuse. More often than not, it sets the stage for debates over surveillance, strong encryption, AI regulation, age verification, and censorship. In these debates, the increasingly exceptional measures demanded by governments are curtailed only – and inconsistently – by international human rights frameworks.
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The stakes for children, whose safety depends on precise and proportionate interventions, are high, but so too are the stakes for others when child-safety concerns are used to justify broad extension of state power. It is therefore essential that the reach of child-safety regulation be clearly and narrowly defined. Otherwise, tools built for the gravest crimes – surveillance networks, content-scanning mandates, criminal penalties – become scaffolding for a broader regime of control far removed from the protection of children.
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Elastic definitions in online child-safety policy
Yet in these debates, both “child” and “safety” have become elastic concepts. Most attention focuses on the renegotiation of “safety,” with the bar expanding to encompass broader notions of harm – including exposure to challenging ideas or mature themes, rather than tangible risks of abuse or exploitation. Examples include social-media age restrictions, limits on AI chatbots, and filtering of LGBTQ+ or sexual-health content. This debate raises significant human-rights issues, but it is not the focus of this article.
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Far less examined is the expansion of the concept of the “child” itself: the extension of child-protection frameworks to fictional and artistic representations of children, and a growing willingness to criminalise imaginary depictions as if they were evidence of real crimes.
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A central harm of this conflation is the diversion of child-safety resources away from real abuse cases and toward the policing of imagination. In the United Kingdom, prosecutions for real child-sexual-abuse images have fallen by nearly 60% since their peak in 2016–17. Over the same period, prosecutions involving fictional content have risen by about a third and now make up roughly 40 percent of all image offences, according to statistics cited in the Drawing the Line Watchlist 2025, released on 10 December 2025 by the Center for Online Safety and Liberty. The report documents examples from ten countries revealing the global consequences of this trend.
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Just as children are not the beneficiaries of this conflation, its targets are not sex offenders, but more often artists, authors, LGBTQ+ communities, and even children themselves. The Watchlist describes a 17-year-old Costa Rican girl arrested over artwork she posted to her blog, with foreign entities backing both the law and its enforcement. In Australia – which does not even record the distinction between real and virtual sex crimes – the author of a fetish novel featuring adult characters faces charges identical to those applied to people who create and distribute recordings of the rape of a real child.
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What the evidence does – and doesn’t – show
Besides being harmful, treating fictional sexual content as equivalent to lived abuse is unjustified on any legitimate child-safety grounds. Proponents often claim such material normalises or encourages abuse, yet there is no empirical support for this, and emerging research cited in the Watchlist finds no association between exposure to fictional sexual material and risk of offending. This aligns with broader criminological research in which risk assessments draw on interpersonal, developmental, and situational factors rather than on media consumption patterns.
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Sensitive expressive content – especially pornographic or taboo material – may raise broader social concerns. But where such concerns exist, appropriate responses are more nuanced and fall to trust-and-safety practitioners, educators, and public-health professionals, not police. International human-rights law does not permit criminal sanctions for “the mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts,” as the U.S. Supreme Court held in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition. European and international standards similarly require necessity and proportionality, limiting criminal penalties to preventing or punishing conduct causing real and identifiable harm.
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Despite this, the proper limits of criminalising expressive content depicting children receive too little scrutiny – and it is not hard to see why. Politicians and interest groups often brand those who question overreach as apologists for abuse. Even less sympathy exists for creators or users of media perceived as sexualising children, illustrated by British MP Jess Phillips’s claim that such people are “just as disgusting” as hands-on offenders. Predictably, almost no mainstream discourse supports drawing a principled line separating fictional works from real abuse material.
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A categorical reset for child-safety law
Yet technology policy should not be driven by disgust – an emotion that tends to unmoor child-safety laws from legality and from their ethical foundation: protecting real children from lived abuse. That experience should not be minimised by conflating it with personal expression. The Watchlist seeks to distinguish expression from abuse and offers recommendations for enforcing a clear separation in law, language, and policy.
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First, it recommends reserving the term child sexual abuse material (CSAM) exclusively for content documenting an actual crime involving an identifiable victim. Hybrid terms such as CSAEM (child sexual abuse and exploitation material) or AIG-CSAM (AI-generated CSAM) should be abandoned. This distinction should apply throughout the criminal-justice system – in the drafting of criminal and censorship laws, the work of enforcement agencies, the penalties imposed for violations, and the statistics maintained for transparency – each respecting the line between expression and abuse.
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The Watchlist shows how the creep of child-safety regulation – and the infrastructure accompanying it, from criminal-justice systems to content-scanning mandates – lands very differently when the material is fictional. Blurring the line legitimises the overstepping of human-rights boundaries, over-criminalises marginalised communities, and diverts resources from genuine child protection into the expansion of law-enforcement powers that exceed, and sometimes even undermine, that very aim.
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Conclusion
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Child safety is an imperative. But conflating personal expression with abuse does not shield children; it shields policymakers from accountability. It substitutes moral panic for evidence and politics for public health. The human-rights framework exists to guard against such drift: even virtuous intentions must yield to necessity and proportionality. The Drawing the Line Watchlist 2025 exposes how the harshest edges of internet regulation are shaped by blurring the boundary between expression and abuse. That boundary must be redrawn – firmly and transparently – to refocus child-safety law on real children and real harm.
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This article was first published in Internet Policy Review on December 15, 2025 and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany license.
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Review: Banning Books in America
Banning Books in America: Not a How-to, edited by Samuel Cohen, is a timely and often unsettling collection of essays that documents—and interrogates—the renewed intensity of efforts to restrict access to books in the United States. Although the subtitle signals irony, the book is serious in purpose: it is less concerned with cataloguing individual censorship incidents than with examining what those incidents reveal about contemporary American politics, culture, and anxieties about power, identity, and education.
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Cohen’s introduction sets the tone by situating book banning within a broader landscape of democratic backsliding, culture-war politics, and what he characterizes as rhetorical violence. He is careful to acknowledge a common rejoinder—that few books are literally banned in the sense of being outlawed—but insists, persuasively, that the distinction misses the point. Removing books from classrooms, libraries, and curricula is ultimately about controlling access to ideas, and access is where the real harm lies. Framed this way, book banning becomes not a fringe concern of librarians or educators, but a frontline issue for intellectual freedom.
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The structure of the book reinforces this argument by bringing together multiple perspectives. The first section, “Writers on Book Banning,” foregrounds authors’ reflections on what it means to have their work challenged or suppressed. Lydia Millet’s essay is particularly sharp in its refusal to romanticize censorship even while acknowledging its occasional “boomerang effect.” Her observation that banning is a crude but revealing signal of perceived social threat cuts to the heart of why certain books attract attention in the first place: not because of their literary qualities, but because of the identities and experiences they render visible.
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Other contributions, such as Jane Smiley’s conversation about the banning of A Thousand Acres, underline how flimsy the stated justifications for many challenges are. Smiley’s calm insistence that parents may guide their own children’s reading, but that the state has no business doing so for everyone else, exposes how quickly “protecting children” slides into an assertion of political control over knowledge.
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The second section, “Arguments About Book Banning,” shifts into a more overtly analytical register. Essays here situate contemporary censorship campaigns within longer historical and ideological traditions, from Cold War fears to moral panics around sexuality, race, and national identity. Several contributors make the important point that euphemisms matter: calling these practices “challenges” or “review processes” rather than bans obscures their cumulative effect. When access is narrowed systematically, the distinction becomes largely semantic.
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One of the book’s strengths is that it does not frame censorship as a problem unique to one political camp. While the current wave of school and library bans is overwhelmingly driven by right-wing activism, contributors also acknowledge instances in which pressure from the left has resulted in pre-publication withdrawals or institutional timidity. This refusal to draw comfort from partisan purity gives the collection credibility, even where individual readers may disagree with particular emphases.
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The final section, “Teachers on Book Banning,” brings the discussion back to lived consequences. Essays by educators describe the chilling effect that vague laws and politicized oversight have on teaching, curriculum design, and student engagement. What emerges most clearly here is how banning rarely affects the powerful; instead, it disproportionately limits young people’s exposure to stories about marginalized communities—the very students who might most benefit from seeing their experiences reflected in literature.
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What Banning Books in America does not attempt to do is offer a simple programmatic solution. In that sense, the subtitle is accurate. The book’s ambition is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. It asks readers to reckon with why books provoke such fear, what we believe reading does to people, and why so many adults are willing to sacrifice intellectual freedom in the name of protecting children from discomfort rather than harm.
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For readers already alarmed by the resurgence of censorship in schools and libraries, this book will provide language, history, and context for those concerns. For readers inclined to minimize the problem, it offers a clear-eyed account of how access can be curtailed without ever lighting a bonfire. Banning Books in America ultimately makes a modest but forceful case: that a society confident in its values does not need to fear what young people might read, and that democracy depends as much on the freedom to encounter unsettling ideas as on the freedom to express them.
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Join Us as an Activist
Once again COSL has an opening for an Activist to join our team to help drive strategic, high-impact advocacy initiatives. In this role, you’ll work closely with COSL’s management team to identify timely opportunities, design persuasive campaigns, and bring them to life through social media, open letters, policy submissions, petitions, and direct engagement. You’ll meet virtually with policymakers, influencers, and coalition partners, build relationships across borders, and help ensure COSL’s voice is heard in fast-moving debates around online safety, censorship, and digital rights.
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This is a part-time, fully remote volunteer role (approximately 5–10 hours per week) ideal for someone who is deeply motivated by digital-rights issues and eager to turn ideas into action. You’ll gain hands-on experience in advocacy strategy, lobbying, and campaign execution, while connecting with a global network of civil-liberties and technology-policy professionals. If you’re passionate about defending online freedom — and want to help shape the conversations that matter — we warmly invite you to apply.
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