Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, so well put forward by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bertin, Lady Kidron, Lady Kennedy and Lady Benjamin, but I particularly want to say a few words about Amendment 298 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin.

I have been really alarmed by this. I was first alerted by my friend Laura Bates talking in her book about the “nudify” apps and how young children can be when they can get targeted—as young as eight or nine—and how this can happen to them in school, where they can be completely unaware and, suddenly, there is a picture of them naked circulating around, and a lot of girls want to drop out of school because of it.

It is not an accident that this is happening. It is driven by money, commerce and capitalism. It is not in any way inevitable that it happens. Something that is made by man—probably by a man, in this case, but maybe by a woman—can certainly be put right by government and by all of us. It is the result of a design choice, a market choice and a policy choice, and we can change it.

These apps are designed to strip girls’ photos and create sexualised images of them, often in seconds. They are incredibly easy to use, quite terrifyingly. I challenge anyone in this House who has not done it just to type in, “Can I have a nudify app?” You will get it in a minute. My great niece, who I work with, did it to herself, and the super weird thing about it is that it does not give you the body of Claudia Schiffer or Kate Moss or something that you are obviously not; it gives you the kind of body that you have.

The reality of it is very stark and horrible. Girls are harassed, threatened, coerced and manipulated before they even really understand what is happening. There is one major app that produces 200,000 fake nude images every day, and we are on track for 8 million of these deepfake images every year. They are an entire industry, which is functioning somewhere, taking money and doing this to our children. The police cannot act until after the harm has occurred, and schools cannot act pre-emptively. The platforms claim that they are not responsible because this is a tool, and it is not them. It is passing off the responsibility. They exist just to facilitate sexual abuse—for which, at the moment, very few people have to pay a price.

I would also like to speak about something that has happened but has not been mentioned very much in this debate. I am an ambassador and patron of a group called The Vavengers, which seeks to stop vaginal mutilation. The person who runs it is Turkish, and she has noticed now that the primary form of cosmetic surgery in Turkey is young women—though not all of them young—going there to have their vaginas reconstructed to look like the vaginas that you see in pornography, which look like those of 13 year-old girls. They are going to Turkey to have their labia cut off. Sema, who is the child of a slave and an extraordinary woman, says you can always tell when you are on the return plane from Istanbul because there are a lot of young women fidgeting because they are in pain. It seems to me that this is an extension of the world that we have arrived in and allowed to happen. It is shocking.

My granddaughter is three. I look at her and think that, in four or five years’ time, she could be the victim of this. As those in this House know, I got into this 55 years ago. If anyone had told me then that the day would come when I would have to ask for someone not to be able to have an app that would take my granddaughter’s clothes off and make her a neurotic, unhappy young woman because she is sexually not like the things she sees in pornography, and with my grandson, who is also three, going through the kind of things that I think young men do, I would say that we should be damned ashamed of ourselves. All of us women in this House, of different ages, have fought long and hard through the years to get where we are, and we and this Government owe it back to the next generation of children. I am very grateful to all the younger women such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Bertin and Lady Owen, for the work they have done. I can only say that I wish that I was not on this journey with them and that it did not exist.

[Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson (Con)]

My Lords, I too support my noble friend Lady Bertin’s amendments and I will particularly talk about Amendment 314. There is no debate about whether certain pornography is harmful. Parliament settled that question decades ago. There is no debate about whether it is right for our Parliament to ban harmful pornography. We already do. We are merely debating whether we have the determination to apply our existing laws to the latest distribution channels.

In the early 1980s, we saw a dramatic increase in video cassette recorders in the home and the subsequent emergence of video nasties. In that era, Parliament was quick to catch up to the latest technological innovation and, as we have heard, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was passed with cross-party support. As a result, pornography released on physical formats is and has always been strictly regulated in the UK. In 2003, Parliament extended those protections through the Communications Act to ensure that UK-based video-on-demand services, including those that specialised in pornography, could not distribute content that the British Board of Film Classification would refuse to classify. Amendment 314 simply takes the definition of harmful content in the Communications Act 2003 and seeks to apply it to online pornography, with a proper framework for enforcement. Some 41 years ago, we said that harmful content could not be distributed on video cassettes, 22 years ago we said it could not be distributed through video-on-demand services, and now it is time to close the gap in the law which allows it to be legally distributed on the internet.

Amendments 291 and 290 would ensure that incest material and depictions of child sexual abuse in online pornography are made illegal. My noble friend Lady Bertin and others have already outlined the immense damage that this content does. I welcome the Government’s commitment to end the depiction of strangulation in online pornography, not least because it demonstrates their conviction that such material can be banned. All it requires is political will. I hope that the Committee will find that same political will to make pornography that mimics child sex abuse or portrays incest illegal.

I support Amendment 292, which would introduce a statutory duty for platforms to verify the age and consent of individuals who feature in pornography. It is the bare minimum we need to start tackling the rampant exploitation in the porn industry.

I conclude by returning to my starting point. In previous generations, when the technology advanced, from cinema to video and from video to streaming, Parliament acted. Today is no different. We have acted because, as the sponsor of the Video Recordings Act said 40 years ago, incredibly presciently:

“Producers and suppliers of this base and debasing material have only one aim—to supply the worst elements of human nature for profit”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1983; col. 522.]


We have acted because we have long known that violent porn—the type of pornography that depicts acts that are illegal in real life—is damaging. At no point have we as a Parliament or a society proactively debated and agreed to accept the type of abusive pornography that is now mainstream and widespread on the internet. No Minister from any Government has stood at the Dispatch Box and argued that the public have a right to watch scenes depicting incest or child sex abuse—I doubt any Minister would. No Minister has made the case that this material is harmless, and no Minister could, given the evidence we have heard today. We allow this material to proliferate not because we think it is harmless, not because we think it is a matter of free speech, but because we think it is hard to stop. It is hard, but I am hopeful. Today, we have a regulator which is beginning to make great strides in tackling illegal material online. We have a regulator with 40 years’ experience of video classification, and we have a Government who, to echo the words of the Minister, are profoundly committed to halving violence against women and girls. Today, we have an opportunity to close this unconscionable gap in the law. I very much hope that we will do so.