Online Safety Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister assure the House that he, the Minister here and the Minister in the other place, will take advice from all the NGOs and other expert groups that have been working on this crucial issue for so long?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I absolutely can. Ministers have had meetings with such groups and officials have continued to have those meetings, even with the change of Ministers in recent weeks. These have informed the scrutiny and improvement of the Bill to date.

COVID-19 Vaccinations: International Athletes

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I most whole- heartedly congratulate everybody involved, including my noble friend, for their work in the Events Research Programme. They worked very swiftly to develop an evidence base to make sure that we could get people back to doing all the things that they missed doing during lockdown and which are so important to their well-being and mental health and to the wider economic and societal impacts.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister tell the House what arrangements have been made for feeding the athletes at the Commonwealth Games? At the last Olympics, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s completely dominated the food offer because they had paid so much money. That does not send out a great message on health, especially to our kids.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I will write to the noble Baroness about the food options for those attending the Games. Of course, it will be up to people to choose what they wish to eat and to do so in a healthy and nutritious manner.

Public Health: Media Advertising

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

On gambling specifically, as the noble Lord will know, we are reviewing the Gambling Act and looking specifically at advertising issues as part of that. More broadly, we recognise that advertising can have an impact on public health, which is why we continue to keep that impact on all aspects of public health under review and will assess any emerging evidence in a proportionate and measured way. That is why, for instance, we are responding to evidence that children’s exposure to less healthy food-and-drink product advertising can affect what and when they eat. DCMS will of course continue to work with other departments, and the regulators as necessary, to keep the impacts of advertising on public health under review.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, just 2.5% of all food and soft-drink advertising in the UK is spent on fruit and vegetables. Despite Change4Life and the 5 A Day campaign, obesity rates have risen sharply. Yet the relatively simple and extremely cost-effective act of banning advertising of HFSS food on the London Underground has, according to a report published just 10 days ago by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, on 17 February, led to households buying 1,000 calories less a week of HFSS food—6.7% less than would have happened. Will the Government look at expanding schemes of this type and banning adverts for HFSS food? Will they also agree not to water down the excellent proposals in the forthcoming Bill to ban HFSS adverts in prime time on children’s TV?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The Health and Care Bill introduces new UK-wide restrictions for the advertising of less healthy food and drink products, which are due to come into force from 1 January 2023. The noble Baroness referred to the recently published evaluation of the advertising restrictions introduced by Transport for London, which we note were limited to outdoor advertising. We intend to look at and analyse that evaluation in more detail.

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.

Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord and to support my noble friend Lady Kidron, with whom I have the pleasure of sharing an office, so I know quite how hard and consistently she has worked. As other noble Lords have said, that was a blinder of a speech, and I would not want to be in the Minister’s shoes trying to disagree with a single word she said.

I want to speak briefly about the pornography so easily available to young children, especially to young girls. With a few simple taps, you can access pretty much any sex you want. Much of it is rough and involves oral and anal sex. Men pull women around and jerk their head backwards; cameras linger on faces that are always smiling, always saying “Yes!”, always saying “More!”. As one 14 year-old was quoted as saying, “It’s actually amazing how all the women and girls look like they are having a really good time”. The picture that is painted is entirely from the male point of view. This is not loving sex or caring sex; there is no sense of a relationship. This is, all too often, purely about domination and aggression.

It is so prevalent and so easy. It is not actually surprising that many online porn sites have become the primary source of sex education for children. One survey carried out in the US among 2,000 teenagers showed that 720 of them reported that porn sites had taught them everything they thought they needed to know about sex, sexual technique and behaviour—far more knowledge than they ever gained from their friends, schools or parents.

Frankly, good sex education in schools, apart from basic information about contraception, is woefully lacking. For some, there really is nowhere else to go. However, if the internet porn world becomes your go-to point, it acquires glamour and a kind of cool. In the end, it becomes sort of glamorous for a young boy to think of a woman as a slut or a whore, and to show her no respect. Often, a woman pretends to protest in online films but then gives in and maintains that she enjoys it. Even when a man might be seen to be choking a woman, in the end, it is also seen as, “Well, they like a bit of rough, don’t they?” Most parents are in complete denial about this. Many children say after viewing pornography that they find it disturbing and believe that it influences how they behave.

For girls, of course, it has a very negative effect on body image. All the girls in pornography films are pretty, but they are also always thin. This reinforces one of our evil body images—that thinness is the secret to attraction. It also reinforces the notion that, to be attractive to men, you have to be willing—indeed, you have to be so willing that not even a basic chat-up line is involved, with not even a cup of coffee to get you into bed.

I do not believe that we yet know the full extent of the damage that this easily accessible online pornography is doing to our youngsters in the long term as they grow into adults. However, I know that any narrative that suggests to young women that it is right for them to be subservient to men in any respect, but especially in a sexual sense, will have lifelong damaging effects. Despite the brilliance of the women’s movement, women are still less likely to put themselves forward and demand equal pay, and they still do worse in the workplace. If you grow up believing that you have to do everything that the man wants in these extremely intimate circumstances, it will spill over into all corners of your life. I find it sad and frightening.

Online porn, freely available to all young girls, seems to me, from a feminist point of view, probably the most gigantic step backwards that has happened in 50 years. A girl can click on a site at the age of nine or 10 and find a slightly older woman in the throes of being gang-raped and professing that she thinks it is wonderful; she is probably the young girl too embarrassed to discuss it. I think back to my own childhood. I was absorbed by ponies until I was about 14, when I started to think a bit about boys. I wonder whether I would be the same person I am today had I had online porn.

I got my first job when I was 19, on an underground newspaper called Friends on the Portobello Road. It was a sort of hippy hang-out, and we were all meant to be cool and alternative. However, as I quickly discovered, it was not much different, at least from a woman’s point of view. If you wanted to be cool, you also had to be freely available for sex. It was that dislike, and my understanding of that extreme double standard—was this really a new way of living, or just a great way for the guys to have more fun?—that led to me joining a women’s group. We started a magazine called Spare Rib, which came out 50 years ago next July.

If I had been watching internet porn from the age of 11, I wonder where my self-confidence would have been. Where would my feeling that I could stand up and say, “Hang on, I don’t agree with this. I don’t want to be like this”, have been? I am genuinely not saying this just because it is a convenient thing to say in a debate I want to support. I believe in age assurance and very much believe in what the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said: we do it for cigarettes and alcohol, so we have methods to do it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, laid out so brilliantly, it is not that difficult. It is perfectly possible, and the Government have no excuses. However, it seems to me that we have let a very dangerous thing loose in the world; personally, I am incredibly glad that my path did not cross its path. I do not want to see any more girls have to do that.