Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate and support the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on his crucially important Bill and declare an interest as a member of the Peers for the Planet group and vice-president of the RHS.

This Bill puts sustainability at the heart of our education system in response to the long-term, systemic challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. Over the last few years, young people have shown that they are hungry to learn and to act to protect their future and better prepare themselves to thrive in an ever-changing world. Evidence shows that engaging children and young people through school has a wider impact on community-level behaviour change. Behaviour change by the public is crucial to achieving emissions reduction, and childhood lasts a lifetime.

Teach the Future has been fighting and advocating for comprehensive education on the climate crisis and sustainability for all students, not just through the sciences and geography. Students need to be taught about the climate emergency and the ecological crisis—how they are caused, what we can do to mitigate them and what our future lives and jobs are going to look like due to them. Currently, the national curriculum makes narrow provision for factual knowledge on climate science and geography. There have been calls to create a GCSE in natural history, but this Bill goes further than that: it updates the curriculum to reflect the cross-cutting nature of climate change and to better support the learning approaches needed to build a resilient, well-informed and compassionate society ready to tackle these global challenges and be part of the solution.

By shifting the focus away from just citizenship to include sustainability, we can revitalise the subject and transform it into one that focuses on what young people care about and are keen to be involved in. It needs to become key content in all subject areas. Educators need to be trained in how to teach these difficult topics in a way that empowers students, and there needs to be the funding and resources to do this. The recent Green Jobs Taskforce report recommended that, as part of an integrated curriculum,

“government, employers and education providers should promote the effective teaching of climate change and the knowledge and skills … required for green jobs.”

Will the Government respond to this and action it as a priority?

I am an optimist and I believe we can invent our way out of the climate crisis we are facing. This Bill responds directly to the concerns of young people and addresses their future prosperity and well-being. We have a responsibility to act, to listen to them and, most of all, to press the reset button to change the world.

Ofsted Review of Sexual Abuse in Schools and Colleges

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, Ofsted was asked to conduct a rapid review of sexual harassment and abuse in schools and colleges in England after thousands of harrowing testimonies detailing sexual abuse and misconduct in schools were posted on the Everyone’s Invited website this year. I was last teaching full-time in 2016, when these problems were emerging, but nothing was evident on the scale that has erupted in the past couple of years.

Inspectors visited 32 unnamed schools and colleges in both the independent and state sectors, including a number named on Everyone’s Invited, and spoke to more than 900 children and young people. Nine out of 10 girls and half the boys who took part in the review said that being sent unsolicited explicit pictures or videos happened

“a lot or sometimes to them or their peers.”

A similar proportion of girls—92%—and three-quarters of boys complained of recurrent sexist name-calling. The report said:

“The frequency of these harmful sexual behaviours means that some children and young people consider them normal.”


Although the review focused mainly on secondary school-aged children, inspectors went to two primary schools and found that there were already concerns about children viewing porn and inappropriate images on social media.

Ofsted wants head teachers to take a whole-school approach and develop a culture where all kinds of sexual harassment are addressed and sanctioned. It calls for sex education to allow sufficient time to cover consent and sharing explicit images, and it urges the Government to take the findings of the review into account as they develop the online safety Bill. Ofsted tells us that this is a cultural issue; it is about attitudes and behaviours becoming normalised. Schools and colleges cannot solve that by themselves. The Government need to look at online bullying and abuse and the ease with which children can access pornography.

The Ofsted report echoes the findings of a landmark report by the Commons Women and Equalities Committee in 2016. I simply ask the Minister: why has nothing happened since then? How can we be sure that real change will come about after the Ofsted report? We have had reports in the past and nothing has happened, so what is different now?

Earlier today in the education debate—eloquently led by my noble friend Lady Morris—I spoke about an outstanding report published yesterday by the Welsh Labour Government on their plans for education recovery in Wales, which puts learners at the centre. It is called Renew and Reform: Supporting Learners’ Wellbeing and Progression, and I again recommend it as essential reading.

Yesterday also saw the publication by Minister Jeremy Miles MS of a written statement on sexual harassment and abuse in education settings in Wales, and I sincerely offer the following suggestions to this Government from the Welsh Government’s review. The Minister will request Estyn, our Ofsted, to conduct a review into culture and process in schools to help protect and support young people better. While the findings of that review will play an important role in supporting settings and informing government policy, the Minister recognises that we cannot await the outcome of that review before he acts, so he expects that every school and local authority should have a designated lead responsible for supporting learners with relationships and sexuality education.

The Welsh Government have published extensive guidance on preventing and responding to child sexual abuse, including their statutory guidance, Keeping Learners Safe. Furthermore, they have published violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence guidance for school governors and a toolkit for education staff containing best practice, as well as supporting the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales with the development of its strategy. The Welsh Government’s National Action Plan Preventing and Responding to Child Sexual Abuse has 10 objectives, including objective 2:

“Increased awareness in children of the importance of safe, equal and healthy relationships and that abusive behaviour is always wrong.”


Working with regional safeguarding boards, they are implementing the plan with the view that more must be done. I once again offer the UK Government, via the Minister, the opportunity to learn from what devolved Governments are already doing in this extremely difficult and sensitive area.

I have a series of questions for the UK Government. Will they now commit to using the online safety Bill to tackle the forced and unwanted sharing of nude photos and other online harassment? What support will the Government provide to schools to create the whole-school and whole-college approaches to tackling sexual harassment recommended by Ofsted? Does the Minister agree that the Office for Students’ recent Statement of Expectations falls short of the action needed to tackle the estimated 50,000 incidents of sexual harassment and abuse taking place on university campuses each year? Something must indeed be done.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges, and I am pleased to hear the Government’s response.

I have been raising much of what has been highlighted in the review for many years in this House. Countless parents have contacted me to tell me about the sexual abuse and harassment that their children have had to face in schools. Some children as young as four have been sexually assaulted by children as young as 10. Teenage girls have told me about the aggressive sexual abuse that they have had to face for more than 10 years now. Many have felt ashamed about what they have been asked to perform, and they have even resorted to self-harm and experienced suicidal thoughts.

So nothing in the review has come as a surprise to me or to many teachers across the country in both public and state schools, as well as in colleges and universities. Many signed an open letter that I wrote to the Prime Minister just last month, highlighting our concerns at the epidemic of sexual abuse fuelled by online pornography. Let us give a thought to all those who have been affected.

The review by Ofsted rightly has a strong emphasis on education, and the PSHE Association has long recommended that best practice for RSHE is for it to be delivered as part of a spiral PSHE curriculum that builds children’s knowledge and skills and contributes to supporting them in navigating their social worlds both now and in future. That requires timetabled lessons, trained teachers and accountability through inspection bodies. What commitments are there from inspectoral bodies, including Ofsted and the Independent Schools Inspectorate, to inspect PSHE, including RSHE, to the same standard as they would inspect other curriculum areas, including Ofsted ensuring that PSHE is inspected within the “quality of education” element of its inspection framework? It is vital that schools provide evidence of their three Is—intent, implementation and impact—as they would for history, maths, science or any other curriculum areas.

The current training modules released by the DfE are widely criticised by teachers due to their focusing on simply imparting factual knowledge to teachers. PSHE and RSHE can be dangerous if taught by teachers who are undertrained and underprepared. Will the Government commit to training that demonstrates effective improvement of teachers’ confidence and competence in teaching RSHE? If the DfE is not able to provide this training, will the Government ensure that schools have funding and teachers’ time to enable it to be available from reputable organisations that have the expertise and experience to equip our teachers?

The Government must ensure that there is guidance that PSHE, including RSHE, is delivered in timetabled lessons of the same length as lessons for other curriculum areas. So-called drop-down days sporadically placed throughout the year cannot be relied upon in schools, because the topics covered are highly sensitive. A whole day spent on such topics could re-traumatise students so much that we have to be careful. Will the Government put guidance in place for school leaders, to ensure that they support their PSHE leads by providing them with time to teach PSHE, time to plan and time to lead and train their colleagues?

I am pleased that the review focused on pornography. Right now, we have on the statute book legislation that Parliament passed four years ago which does two things. It prevents children accessing commercial pornographic websites through age verification and makes provision for the regulator to take robust action against any site showing extreme pornography which normalises violence against women. As the Government reflect on their next steps, they would be well advised to review their decision not to implement Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, which should have been in place 18 months ago. In October 2019, the Government performed a spectacular U-turn, saying they were going back to the drawing board and starting again with completely new legislation. It was only last month that we saw that alternative draft Bill.

I know that Part 3 does not address pornography on social media, but it addresses pornographic websites. Importantly, research published last month on the viewing of online pornography by 16 and 17 year-olds states that

“pornography was much more frequently viewed on pornographic websites than on social media, showing how important the regulation of such sites remains”.

We need regulation to deal with pornographic websites and pornography on social media. That is why both Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act and the online harms Bill are so important. To use the fact that Part 3 does not deal with pornography on social media as a reason not to implement the legislation that we have already passed is quite absurd, especially as the draft Bill has not even started pre-legislative scrutiny. It will be at least three years, and probably four to five, by the time the online harms Act and its attendant legislation and regulator are ready to deliver—significantly longer than it would take to implement Part 3. Let us do it.

I welcome the fact that the Government have committed to work to

“identify whether there are actions that can be taken more quickly to protect children before the Online Safety Bill comes into effect”.

This is music to my ears. Without age verification now, preventing young people viewing pornography is like trying to get a drug addict off heroin while at the same time giving them heroin. We are in a place where we can take robust action in relation to pornographic websites immediately, as an interim measure, while we develop the best possible online harms Bill to address the growing social media challenge. Will the Government do so for the sake of our young people and take action to halt this scourge on society and young minds now?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses for their contributions and for outlining the common theme of the questions I have been asked about the RHSE curriculum. In fact, we have been acting on the WESC report from 2016. That was the beginning of the development of the new curriculum, which was updated from the 2000 curriculum. We have been working very hard since 2016, so the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, can be reassured that we have taken action and have been developing that curriculum. We responded to the contributions from teachers that they wanted resource and help. There is a portal for teacher resources, and various webinar-type training sessions have been run as well.

Even though we have all lived through the pandemic, the RHSE curriculum, which is compulsory in all schools —private, independent and state-funded—was brought into effect in September 2020. We gave schools some flexibility about how they introduce it—for instance, there has been a requirement for them to consult with parents on the curriculum and the resources during the pandemic—but as of September this year they need to be delivering that curriculum. A great deal of work and effort has gone into developing appropriate support for teachers, but we recognise that Ofsted’s review asks us to go even further, saying that teachers do not have the confidence to teach this curriculum, so we are working to see what more we can do on the portal and to support teachers to deliver this curriculum.

I am pleased to learn from the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, that the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted will now be doing a review following the publication of the Ofsted review. I thank Her Majesty’s chief inspector and her team for doing such a swift and thorough review, and I thank the 900 young people who took part, talking to the team and discussing matters that were perhaps not the easiest to discuss.

The Government have responded to feedback on issues of peer-on-peer abuse going back to about 2016, when schools responded to the annual Keeping Children Safe in Education consultations by saying they were not confident in dealing with the issue of peer-on-peer abuse manifesting particularly in sexual abuse and sexual harassment. We updated the guidance: there is now a chapter on this particular matter, and there is stand-alone guidance on peer-on-peer sexual harassment and sexual abuse in schools. We have developed that as a response to the sector. Although the Ofsted review makes recommendations relating to the other statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, there was no specific requirement, because we have been working hard with the contribution of the sector year on year.

As I said, the guidance is out for consultation each year—one year for technical consultation and the next for substantive review. We have responded to that. That is not to say there is not more we need to do. There are issues around the low-level concerns, and that spreads beyond the peer-on-peer abuse and into workforce/children issues: what do you do when you have low-level concerns that are below the threshold for report? How do you deal with those disciplinary matters? We will be looking at low-level concerns.

On the issues to do with online safety, the online safety Bill will, of course, come with pre-legislative scrutiny, so noble Lords will have an opportunity to look at that in detail. The Secretary of State has also asked the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, to specifically look at the issue of access to pornography. I will take back specific questions on Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, which I was not, unfortunately, familiar with, to see about that issue.

The Office for Students is asking universities to review their practices on how they deal with these allegations and how they fulfil their duties to protect students while they are on campus. As far as I am aware, this is inspected as part of the new Ofsted framework. It came in when Ofsted was not there, if I remember correctly, from September 2020, but Ofsted came back in some form and is now back fully. As the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, mentioned, the ISI was also involved on the reference group for the review, I believe. We are working closely and there are recommendations on how it is to conduct its own inspections, its training of inspectors and making sure that it talks to young people about these issues—not just bullying and other things but grasping the nettle when it is in schools to talk appropriately to single-sex groups of pupils while it does its inspection.

It is a learning process. We are not starting from nothing. As I say, there has been a lot to do and we have worked very hard on guidance to try to aid schools in this role. The NSPCC helpline is also open until October for young people who have posted on Everyone’s Invited to phone and get the appropriate help and be put through to appropriate agencies, if that is needed. There are also recommendations in terms of the safeguarding partnerships which we put into statute, requiring the police, health and the local authority to work together, and the review asks them to reach out to schools, as they are increasingly part of the process for schools to safeguard their students by referring specific concerns.

This is very much a sense check for us at the moment as to what has been going on. Yes, we have been appalled by the levels, but we are grateful to have had this moment when they were revealed. The review is just one part of a work in progress. We should not underestimate this and I am grateful that the review pointed out the need to professionalise the role of the designated safeguarding lead in our schools. Those people do an amazing job, often dealing with workforce/children issues, with peer-on-peer issues and with children’s social care issues. We should not underestimate what is expected of them in what they are trying to deliver in schools for us. It was clear to me when I met some head teachers the strains that there are on DSLs. They often have to look at these images and then go home to their families: it is a really difficult job. We are looking at the model of the SENCO to see what more we can do to professionalise the DSLs, but I pay tribute to our schools: they really are doing their best to deal with this issue.

Peer-on-peer abuse is very difficult, particularly when a lot of this is not in the criminal justice system. That leaves schools adjudicating, sometimes on issues that may be criminal but do not go down the criminal justice path: how do they protect the victim instead of the criminal justice system? It is a very difficult behaviour and safeguarding issue in our schools and it will be a work in progress to help them fulfil those duties to safeguard our young people.

Secondary Schools: Arts Subjects

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, schools offer a number of co-curricular or extracurricular activities. As the Minister responsible for out-of-school settings, I know that much of that activity takes place in those areas. Indeed, the National Tutoring Programme does not deliver as the noble Lord outlined, at the moment. However, a proportion of the tutoring money from the latest and third tranche of recovery money will go directly to schools. As well as being able to spend the universal catch-up and recovery premiums in the manner that schools choose, the school-led aspect of the National Tutoring Programme will enable them to have small-group or one-on-one tutoring in the subjects that the noble Lord mentioned.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, the creative industries are facing a challenge in finding young talent to maintain their high profits, which provide over £100 billion to the Treasury. Apart from that, six out of the 10 top skills that secondary students will need for any industry in 2025 are well fostered through the arts subjects and will ensure that they are career-ready in our competitive world. I ask the Minister how the Government are planning to support students today to reach their potential in the world of work in years to come, if creative subjects are not being taught at sufficiently high numbers in schools. I declare an interest as per the register.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, since the introduction of the EBacc, the take-up of GCSEs in the arts has remained broadly stable. As I believe the noble Baroness is aware, we also developed a pilot project, funded by DCMS, for apprenticeships, which are important in this sector. We are developing this with ScreenSkills as a partner, because people do not tend to have one employer in this sector and move from project to project. We had to pause because of Covid, but we hope to extend the pilot and look again to make sure that there are apprenticeships in this area for young people to take advantage of.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Benjamin (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak in this important International Women’s Day debate, as it comes at a troubling time. I too spare a thought for Sarah Everard’s family and their loss.

When we consider the impact of the pandemic on women, we must also consider the impact on children, because the experiences of children and their mothers are intertwined. As I always say: childhood lasts a lifetime. We women need to nurture and protect children, now more than ever. Yet many vulnerable women are being subjected to exploitation and domestic violence, or suffering from mental health problems which affect their children too. Will the Government create a Cabinet-level Minister for children, because this pandemic will come to define today’s generation of children, just like the Second World War defined an earlier generation?

Even before the pandemic there was a crisis in our children’s mental health. Last year, official figures from NHS England showed that one in six young people had mental health problems. Children have been out of school for many months, away from friends and family, and unable to play or take part in sports. Some children, especially those from black, Asian and minority communities, have suffered bereavement. Many have experienced their parents becoming increasingly anxious about finances, the virus, and balancing work and childcare.

Some 76% of Barnardo’s front-line workers said that they were supporting families who needed to use food banks, community kitchens or welfare. As a vice-president of Barnardo’s—here I declare an interest—I am proud that the charity, along with many others, has played a role in addressing these issues, distributing £350,000-worth of food packages, helping to pay families’ electricity and gas bills, paying for laptops so that children can learn from home, plus providing well-being packs to help with mental health issues.

Another effect of the pandemic on children is the loss of learning and, in particular, the widening of the education gap for the most vulnerable. Home learning is fine if you have your own room and your own computer, with parents who are able to help, but it is very different if you are sharing a room and have one smartphone among three siblings.

There is also a heightened risk of harm to children at home, both online and in the community. Many are trapped at home with adults who are abusive to them or to each other. With both children and predators spending more time online, more children are at risk of grooming or of being coerced into sharing naked images of themselves. On top of this, we have children not feeling safe at home and so hanging out on the streets, at the mercy of gangs looking to exploit them.

During the pandemic, Barnardo’s led a Department for Education-funded programme called See, Hear, Respond. The programme worked with over 80 partners, including small and community-led charities, reaching over 65,000 vulnerable children and young people who do not qualify for statutory support. It carries out vital work: 60% of referrals relate to mental health issues and the focus is on helping children reintegrate into education, keeping them well and safe from gangs. So why have the Government decided not to fund the programme beyond the end of this month? It could play a vital role in helping vulnerable children to adapt back into school and stay safe from harm.

Covid has taken a huge toll on women and the children they love. It is absolutely vital that the Government put families at the heart of the recovery, which must include long-term funding for vital services. It should also mean working differently with partners, including charities, to use our combined resources more effectively to make sure that we deliver the support our communities need to thrive and bring optimism into people’s lives.

National Curriculum

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, Black History Month was established 33 years ago, and this year there has been a real desire to find out more about our diverse British history. The year 2020 seems like the beginning of the age of enlightenment, when the shackles were broken and eyes were opened. So how do the Government plan to further that interest? Will they consider broadening exam specification choices to include a wider range of topics that cover our untold history and for exam boards to facilitate this through high-quality resources?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, yes, as I have outlined, teachers are encouraged to use their flexibility to meet the needs of all the pupils in their classroom and to choose from a diverse range of sources to educate those children in accordance with the context they are living in and the history of this country.

Education Settings: Autumn Opening

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

Of course I join the noble Lord in paying tribute to the extraordinary effort by teachers, support staff and school business leaders at the moment in offering education. Over 200,000 of the laptops were delivered on target by the end of June, so the commitment that we made has been delivered. As I say, we have a slight surplus so that we can deal with any further orders that we get and can have a certain degree of flexibility in future. However, we have to trust the schools. The department cannot issue these laptops to individual children; we have given them to local authorities and therefore to schools and multi-academy trusts. They know the students who need them, and we trust them as professionals to have distributed them properly.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD) [V]]

My Lords, if, as suggested, students coming back to school remain in year groups and are kept separate, it might prove difficult in secondary schools and will certainly impact years 10, 11, 12 and 13 as students may be with different students for every lesson of the day. Can the Minister explain how that will work with option classes if this suggestion is put in place?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, we recognise that at secondary school there are different subject classes and specialist teachers who need to be in front of the groups of students—that is why a bubble can actually be as large as a year group in secondary school—but that obviously balances the risk that most of those children will obey the distancing that they have been advised to do. That will give the school the flexibility to offer different subjects to different groups of people. The guidance is clear that even partial distancing has a benefit, so if you step over the line you have not lost all the benefits of the guidance. It is about keeping children partially distanced because we recognise that some young people may not obey the rules.

Schools: Relationships and Sex Education

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Tuesday 12th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, according to the government guidelines, parents need to have been consulted about the new relationships, sex and health education curriculum changes, so what expectations will there be for schools that have not been able to consult parents about the changes due to the coronavirus school closures?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, the school support package that we will issue will enable schools and give them examples of best practice in order to consult parents. We have specifically produced leaflets so that they have the confidence to distribute that resource. In terms of the operational decisions in relation to the curriculum, I will update the House when there is any further information

International Women’s Day

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I see International Women’s Day as a focal point for men to recognise women’s contribution globally and for women to celebrate each other’s achievements as we continue to march forward.

Women like my mother—a force of nature—paved the way for my generation, but it was tough and she had to face many unbelievable adversities. I will always be eternally grateful to her for giving me the confidence to succeed. In two days’ time, I am going to Buckingham Palace to receive my damehood. I so wish she was still alive to accompany me. She would have been 94 this year. During her time, she saw progress, with some women of colour—but not all—breaking through the glass ceiling.

There has been progress towards equality for women. Yet, despite this, in the 21st century we are still witnessing reports of sexual and domestic violence against women. Most concerning is the sexualisation of young girls in a society where violent online pornography is only a mouse click away. Degrading behaviour by boys is forcing young girls, whom they see as sexual objects, to perform sexual acts they have seen online. They film this humiliating act and then shame the girls by putting it on the web. The girls, in turn, self-harm or even take their own lives. This has to stop.

Plan International UK, a leading children’s charity, asked young girls about their experiences. One 13 year- old said, “In my school there are a lot of boys who don’t really know how to treat girls. A lot of boys in my year talk about girls like an object—about the way they look; if they’ve got a big bum or big features—stuff like that”. Amazingly, only one in five secondary school teachers has received training in recognising and tackling sexism as part of their initial teacher education.

One way to correct this is for teachers to be better equipped and informed. Resources must be modernised, and school governing bodies and teachers empowered to take a zero-tolerance approach to sexism and sexual harassment. The PSHE Association trains teachers nationally to promote healthy relationships; this must be supported. It has to start in primary school. Recently, a distraught mother told me that her four year-old daughter was sexually abused by a 10 year-old boy at school. He told her: “I’m going to rape you and you’re going to like it”. Where on earth did he hear that language and get that behaviour from? Her daughter is now having therapy. Every time she hears the word “rape” on the news, she asks her mum, “Did she like it, mummy?”

Childhood lasts a lifetime, so what will these two victims of sexual exposure be like as adults, especially the 10 year-old? I want age verification on porn sites to be introduced to prevent children easily accessing pornography. At the moment, there are no age gates. When will the Government introduce age-verification legislation, which is ready to implement, to prevent the corruption of innocent children’s minds? How many more children’s lives are they prepared to witness being damaged? According to the Government’s own figures, 1.4 million children a month—some as young as seven—are accessing violent, graphic pornography.

Another worrying aspect of hyper-sexualisation through pornography is the increasing number of cases of the so-called “sex game gone wrong” defence in murder cases, whereby it is claimed that the deceased woman consented to violent sex which led to her death. This rough sex defence is an uncomfortable chapter in a long history of blaming women for their own killings, rapes and beatings. Sixty women in the UK have been killed by men who have then used the “sex game gone wrong” excuse as part of their defence. Nineteen of these men escaped a murder charge. Five were not charged with anything at all. In some cases, the deaths were not even investigated as a potential crime. Since 2010, the use of rough sex as a defence has risen by 90%.

We have a duty to stop what is clearly a dangerous situation for women’s safety and justice. Figures from the Centre for Women’s Justice show a growing increase in the number of young women who consent to violent, demeaning acts, normalised by extreme pornography. The industry is having to become more shocking in order to get clicks, as their audience becomes immune to previous scenes. Sexualised images of strangling women are becoming more common online. There has not been one single court case in the UK of a man being killed by a woman in a sex game gone wrong. Choking during sex is being encouraged and more women are being killed. Courts are not serving justice.

It is not just the porn industry that is the problem. Women’s magazines publish articles about how to spice up your sex life with what is innocently called “breath play”. This is another term for choking.

If light sentences for accidental death during sexual violent acts become the norm, what message does that send out to men, especially those who commit domestic violence? If a man planned to kill a woman, it would be easy to set it up as a sex game gone wrong, and he could reduce his sentence. The courts must not allow this. It is a huge betrayal to the women whom the law is supposed to protect—women such as Hannah Pearson. She was only 16 when she was strangled to death during sex by James Morton, 24. His defence was “consented rough sex gone wrong”. The jury cleared him of murder and instead ruled that it was manslaughter.

Attitudes in the justice system must be changed. Sexual violence against women must never become normalised in the belief that this is the sort of sex that people are up to in the 21st century. So can the Minister confirm that Harriet Harman’s amendments, in the other place, dealing with these disturbing issues will be included in the Domestic Abuse Bill?

How has the murder of women been reduced to a game? Sexual violence is not a game and must not be accepted as such by our courts. Men must take full responsibility for preventing a woman from breathing until death.