Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Farmer

Report stage
Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for engaging with the amendment in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, in Committee, to ensure parity between the regulation of online and offline pornography. We did not table it for Report because of the welcome news of the Government’s review. At this point, I would like to give my backing to all that my noble friend Lord Bethell said and would like to thank him for his great encouragement and enthusiasm on our long journey, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I would particularly like to mention the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who, as my noble friend Lord Bethell mentioned, must be very frustrated today at not being able to stand up and benefit us with her passion on this subject, which has kept a lot of us going.

I have some questions and comments about the review, but first I want to stand back and state why this review is so necessary. Our society must ask how pornography was able to proliferate so freely, despite all the warnings of the danger and consequences of this happening when the internet was in its infancy. Human appetites, the profit motive and the ideology of cyberlibertarianism flourished freely in a zeitgeist where notions of right and wrong had become deeply unfashionable. Pre-internet, pornography was mainly on top shelves, in poky and rather sordid sex shops, or in specialist cinemas. There was recognition that exposure to intimate sex acts should never be accidental but always the result of very deliberate decisions made by adults—hence the travesty of leaving children exposed to the danger of stumbling across graphic, violent and frequently misogynistic pornography by not bringing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 into force.

I have talked previously in this House about sociology professor Christie Davies’ demoralisation of society thesis: what happens when religiously reinforced moralism, with its totemic notion of free will, is ditched along with God. Notions of right and wrong become subjective, individually determined, and a kind of blindness sets in; how else can we explain why legislators ignored the all-too-predictable effects of unrestrained access to pornography on societal well-being, including but not limited to harms to children? For this Bill to be an inflection point in history, this review, birthed out of it, must unashamedly call out the immorality of what has gone before. How should we define morality? Well, society simply does not work if it is governed by self-gratification and expressive individualism. Relationships—the soil of society—including intimate sexual relationships, are only healthy if they are self-giving, rather than self-gratifying. These values did not emerge from the Enlightenment but from the much deeper seam of our Judeo-Christian foundations. Pornography is antithetical to these values.

I turn to the review’s terms of reference. Can the Minister confirm that the lack of parity between online and offline regulation will be included in the legal gaps it will address? Can he also confirm that the review will address gaps in evidence? As I said in Committee, a deep seam of academic research already exists on the harmful effects of the ubiquity of pornography. The associations with greater mental ill health, especially among teenagers, are completely unsurprising; developing brains are being saturated with dark depictions of child sexual abuse, incest, trafficking, torture, rape, violence and coercion. As I mentioned earlier, research shows that adults whose sexual arousal is utterly dependent on pornography can be catastrophically impaired in their ability to form relationships with flesh-and-blood human beings, let alone engage in intimate physical sex.

Will the review also plug gaps in areas that remain underresearched and controversial and where vested interests are bound? On that point, whoever chairs this review will have to be ready, willing and able to take on powerful, ideologically motivated and profit-driven lobbies.

Inter alia, we need to establish through research the extent to which some young women are driven to change their gender because of hyper-sexualised, porn-depicted female stereotypes. Anecdotally, some individuals have described their complete inability to relate to their natal sex. It can be dangerous and distasteful to be a woman in a world of pornified relationships which expects them to embrace strangulation, degradation and sexual violence. One girl who transitioned described finding such porn as a child: “I am ashamed that I was fascinated by it and would seek it out. Despite this interest in watching it, I hated the idea of myself actually being in the position of the women. For a while, I even thought I was asexual. Sex is still scary to me, complicated”.

Finally, the Government’s announcement mentioned several government departments but does not make it clear that they will also draw in the work of DfE and DHSC—the departments for children’s and adult mental health—for reasons I have already touched on. Can the Minister confirm that the remit will include whatever areas of government responsibility are needed so that the review is genuinely broad enough to look across society at how to protect not just children but adults?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 184 in my name—