It’s Now Illegal For People Living Apart To Have Sex Indoors, But What About The Garden?

New lockdown laws in England mean that it is now illegal to have sex with someone in another household to you, with #sexban going viral on Twitter today. While it has always been against lockdown rules to visit someone in another household without a ‘reasonable excuse’, rules now official dictate where people can sleep or gather together.

The Health Protection Regulations states that a gathering is considered the following: ‘when two or more people are present together in the same place in order to engage in any form of social interaction with each other, or to undertake any other activity with each other.’

‘No person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place outdoors, and consists of more than six persons,’ it continues. ‘Or indoors, and consists of two or more persons.’

So essentially, if you’ve been heading round to your partners for a weekly romp during lockdown, you’re now breaking the law. Default penalties for breaking lockdown rules start at £100 in England with police able to arrest rule-breakers. However, they do not have the power to check for violations inside peoples properties.

Exceptions to the rule of where you can gather or sleep (that fall under the ‘reasonable excuse’ bracket) include moving home, work, attending funerals, providing care or escaping harm. However, exceptions have not been made for couples that do not live together. Meaning, two people can ‘gather’ together outdoors but not inside.

Should couples choose to have sex outside, there are already pre-existing laws that they can be charged with – that would be outraging public decency or indecent exposure. However, in order to be charged with these there needs to be other people capable of witnessing the act.

So can you have sex in the garden? If it’s entirely private, there doesn’t seem to be any regulation stopping you – there isn’t even a mention of social distancing in the office regulation. In fact, you could have sex with up to six people at the same time by the sounds of it. This in particular has been quite the sticking point online, with many asking for further clarity from the government on whether they can, in fact, have sex in the garden (what a world we live in right now).

But either way, the new regulations have made quite the impact with one lawyer even arguing that the government should make an exception for couples living apart.

‘This is a significant restriction on our rights to privacy and family life, even though it may be justified by the severity of the public health risk,’ Adam Wagner, a human rights barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, told The Independent. ‘Now, as the lockdown is lifting, the regulations have become stricter about what we can do with other people in our own household. And the definition of “gathering” is so wide it could encompass any kind of human activity, including sex.’

‘This may be an unintended consequence of the change, but it will affect many thousands of people and the government should urgently consider whether an exception should be made for people in relationships,’ Wagner added.

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