R18 (British Board of Film Classification)

[2] The R18 category was created in 1982 in response to the recommendations in 1979 of the Home Office Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship chaired by Sir Bernard Williams.

[3][4] On the BBFC website, R18-rated works are filtered out of the main public search (unless an option to show them is selected) as their titles frequently contain profanity and/or vulgar language.

Following a public consultation, the Crown Prosecution Service published guidelines in 2019 indicating that pornography depicting consenting adults engaged in legal acts would no longer be prosecuted under the Act, provided no serious harm was caused and the likely audience was over the age of 18.;[8] it is unclear as to whether the BBFC will revise its guidelines, but they announced that they are discussing what to do next.

[10] The BBFC do not have jurisdiction over content distributed via non-physical media; however, in 2014 the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 amended the Communications Act 2003 to extend the statutory and legal obligations for the distribution of R18 content to "on-demand" programme services, such as streaming media/video on demand over the internet or mobile phone networks and web-based platforms.

[13] The BBFC has previously granted 18 certificates for movies containing short scenes of unsimulated sex, such as Catherine Breillat's Romance (in 1999), Virginie Despentes's Baise Moi (in 2000), Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy (in 2001), Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs (in 2004), short-film compilation Destricted (in 2006), and in 2008 the hardcore version of Tinto Brass's Caligula was passed uncut for DVD with an 18.