Social Media: Deaths of Children

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, and I thoroughly agree with him that we have to go beyond this specific issue to the wider problem. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Kidron on keeping up the pressure on this incredibly important debate. I want to briefly mention two different aspects: one is about young girls and one is about young boys.

I have talked before about the sexual pressures on girls that happens online. I remember so well the anxieties of being a teenager, of trying to set up Spare Rib magazine and feeling immensely conflicted about trying to own your own sexuality and your own rights in the world, to have dignity and control, and to be able to say yes and indeed to be able to say no. Looking back, if I had been able to see the kind of pornography that is now available at a simple click, that would have been extremely hard. You are presented with streams and streams of apparently willing young women who agree to have sex with not so much as a dinner and a nice night out; what they enjoy is a semi-situation of rape, over and over. The women are almost always extremely thin, shaved, hairless, kind of perfect—almost doll-like. They are completely and utterly unreal and bear very little resemblance to what an average teenage girl is. While my noble friend Lady Kidron has spoken so movingly about girls who take their own lives, there are a lot of stages on the road to that which are about misery, dejection, unhappiness and shaming—a consciousness all the time that “I am not good enough.” Indeed, the entire advertising world—you see this hugely online—is predicated on the fact that you could be better. There is no such thing left as normal hair or a normal size. In every case, if you spend money, you will be better.

In my remaining minute and a half I will talk about what happens to young men. In particular, I want to talk about my friend Laura Bates, who wrote Everyday Sexism. She used a fake account to set herself up online as a boy. She said, “I am 15 and I’m having a tough time getting dates” and said that she had acne. To start with, there was advice about acne drugs, then a bit of advice about how to dress. Then the advice started to get a bit creepier: “Are the girls in your school being too uppity? Are they beating you in class?” Quite soon, in the course of a few weeks, Laura found herself on an incel website. The progression was just click by click. It preyed on every sort of suspicion that a young man might have that somehow women are doing better and that somehow their lot in life is not their responsibility but the result of what feminists have done.

It is not a question of arguing this or that; the point is that when you see how the end product of misogyny and incels is now “Kill the women”, that is incredibly dangerous. Right across the internet, young people are being drawn into ever more extreme points of view that bear very little relationship to their reality. It happens across sexuality and with young men. At all points the internet companies could stop this but in many instances they are just making money out of preying on people’s weakness and lack of self-respect. These are all really difficult things to talk about, and if, as has been happening in the pandemic, your online world becomes even more real than your real world, you have very little way to express those feelings and get some help.