On February 25, 2025, the Home Office introduced legislation (the Crime and Policing Bill) that would make it a criminal offense for a person to conduct an act that is capable of encouraging or assisting another person to inflict serious self-harm. Serious self-harm need not occur for an individual to be guilty of the offense, provided the act is intended to lead to potentially self-harming behavior of another person. (Clause 74.) The newly proposed offense would build on current law.
The Home Office is the lead government department for immigration and passports, drugs policy, crime, fire, counter-terrorism and police.
Overview
Under the bill, “encouraging the serious self-harm of a person includes doing so by putting pressure on a person to seriously self-harm (whether by threatening them or otherwise).” (Clause 74.) The conduct may be a single act, a series of acts, a combination of acts and omissions, or ongoing omissions that cause self-harm. Serious self-harm must rise to the level of grievous bodily harm. An example of “serious self-harm” provided in the explanatory notes to the bill is a person causing themselves serious harm by alternately purging food and starving themselves.
The bill would not require offenders to target a specific person or class of persons, or for the offenders to know, or to have identified, the people who receive their messages. (Clause 74.) Thus, if an individual sends a message encouraging or assisting individuals to seriously self-harm and intends for the recipients to do so, it would be an offense even if the individual is unaware of the identity of the recipients of their message. The offense would be punishable upon conviction on indictment with up to five years imprisonment and/or a fine.
Internet service providers would not be regarded as encouraging or assisting serious self-harm if they simply provided the Internet service through which the communication was sent, transmitted, or published. (Clause 75.)
These provisions would apply in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. (Clause 134(4).)
Background
Section 184 of the Online Safety Act 2023, which became law in October 2023, established the offense of encouraging or assisting serious self-harm verbally or through electronic communications, publications or correspondence. That “gave partial effect to the Law Commission recommendation to create an offence, modelled on the offence of encouraging and assisting suicide, to tackle the encouragement of self-harm,” according to a policy paper from the Home Office.
The policy paper says the proposed offense in the Crime and Policing Bill is broader than existing law and would cover “all means by which serious self-harm may be encouraged or assisted, including by any means of communication and in any other way,” such as through verbal communications or direct assistance by providing a knife. The proposal, if enacted, would fully implement the Law Commission’s recommendation.
Clare Feikert, Law Library of Congress
April 1, 2025
Read more Global Legal Monitor articles.
Read Law Library reports on the United Kingdom.