Victims and Prisoners Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Report stage
Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to support this, with a slightly heavy heart. It has the virtue of common sense, which I feel might not necessarily chime terribly well with the Front Bench; it seems eminently sensible. I realise that the Minister often talks about the need to join the dots, and I think this is a textbook example of a challenge of trying to join up a great many dots that are all over the place at the moment.

I recognise that the Front Bench is not going to stand up and say, “What a wonderful idea; we will do it immediately”. At the very least, if there is an acknowledgement of the fact that we have a problem—and I think we all agree that the status quo at the moment, as far as victims are concerned, is a long way from where we would wish it to be—it behoves the Government to think about putting together a properly resourced project to look at this systematically, across all the different agencies, and at least analyse the scale and complexity of the problem and perhaps come up with a range of two or three possible solutions, with the pros and cons of each, the costs and the time they would take to implement. We would then, at least, have a better handle on how we might deal with this problem, which we all acknowledge is a problem.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is important to acknowledge that we need to improve the kind of data collection that we have. This is a really good idea, and I would like it to be pursued. I have an amendment later on consistency of data. One of the things I felt when I was looking at the issues was that, too often, victims are not counted properly. We know that there is a range of ways to produce crime statistics: discussions about victims can be very emotive and subjective. The more accurate information we have and the more rationally collected it is—a point was made about common sense—the better it is for society, so that it cannot be turned into a political football. We would know exactly what was going on, so that the right kind of research and resources could be allocated. I would like to hear from the Minister some ideas about at least being open to this and experimenting with it. It is eminently worth exploring further, and I would like to hear a positive response.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Committee stage
Thursday 25th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I personally think that it is pessimistic view of the future to suggest that humanity cannot rise to the task of being able to distinguish between deep fakes and real images. Organising all our lives, laws and liberties around the deviant predilections of a minority of sexual offenders on the basis that none of us will be able to tell the difference in the future, when it comes to that kind of activity, is rather dangerous for freedom and innovation.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly. I could disagree with much of what the noble Baroness just said, but I do not need to go there.

What particularly resonates with me today is that, since I first entered your Lordships’ House at the tender age of 28 in 1981, this is the first time I can ever remember us having to rein back what we are discussing because of the presence of young people in the Public Gallery. I reflect on that, because it brings home the gravity of what we are talking about and its prevalence; we cannot run away or hide from it.

I will ask the Minister about the International Regulatory Cooperation for a Global Britain: Government Response to the OECD Review of International Regulatory Cooperation of the UK, published 2 September 2020. He will not thank me for that, because I am sure that he is already familiar and word-perfect with this particular document, which was pulled together by his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I raise this because, to think that we can in any way, shape or form, with this piece of legislation, stem the tide of what is happening in the online world—which is happening internationally on a global basis and at a global level—by trying to create regulatory and legal borders around our benighted island, is just for the fairies. It is not going to happen.

Can the Minister tell us about the degree to which, at an international level, we are proactively talking to, and learning from, other regulators in different jurisdictions, which are battling exactly the same things that we are? To concentrate the Minister’s mind, I will point out what the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, committed the Government to doing nearly three years ago. First, in relation to international regulatory co-operation, the Government committed to

“developing a whole-of-government IRC strategy, which sets out the policies, tools and respective roles of different departments and regulators in facilitating this; … developing specific tools and guidance to policy makers and regulators on how to conduct IRC; and … establishing networks to convene international policy professionals from across government and regulators to share experience and best practice on IRC”.

I am sure that, between now and when he responds, he will be given a detailed answer by the Bill team, so that he can tell us exactly where the Government, his department and Ofcom are in carrying out the commitments of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I completely understand that; I was making the point that there will be disagreements in judgments. In that instance, it was resolved by a court, but we are talking about a situation where I am not sure how the judgment is made.

In these amendments, there are lists of particular harms—a variety are named, including self-harm—and I wanted to provide some counterexamples of what I consider to be harms. I have been inundated by algorithmic adverts for “Naked Education” on Channel 4, maybe because of the algorithms I am on. I think that the programme is irresponsible; I say that having watched it, rather than just having read a headline. Channel 4 is posing this programme with naked adults and children as educational by saying that it is introducing children to the naked body. I think it is harmful for children and that it should not be on the television, but it is advertised on social media—I have seen quite a lot of it.

The greatest example of self-harm we encounter at present is when gender dysphoric teenagers—as well as some younger than teenagers; they are predominately young women—are affirmed by adults, as a kind of social contagion, into taking body-changing and body-damaging hormones and performing self-mutilation, whether by breast binding or double mastectomies, which is advertised and praised by adults. That is incredibly harmful for young people, and it is reflected online at lot, because much of this is discussed, advertised or promoted online.

This is related to the earlier contributions, because I am asking: should those be added to the list of obvious harms? Although not many noble Lords are in the House now, if there were many more here, they would object to what I am saying by stating, “That is not harmful at all. What is harmful is what you’re saying, Baroness Fox, because you’re causing psychological harm to all those young people by being transphobic”. I am raising these matters because we think we all agree that there is a consensus on what is harmful material online for young people, but it is not that straightforward.

The amendment states that the Bill should target any platform that posts

“links to, or … encourages child users to seek”

out “dangerous or illegal activity”. I understand “illegal activity”, but on “dangerous” activities, I assume that we do not mean extreme sports, mountain climbing and so on, which are dangerous—that comes to mind probably because I have spent too much time with young people who spend their whole time looking at those things. I worry about the unintended consequences of things being banned or misinterpreted in that way.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

To respond briefly to the noble Baroness, I shall give a specific example of how Amendment 93 would help. Let us go back to the coroner’s courtroom where the parents of Molly Russell were trying to get the coroner to understand what had happened to their daughter. The legal team from Meta was there, with combined salaries probably in seven figures, and the argument was about the detail of the content. At one point, I recall Ian Russell saying that one of the Meta lawyers said, “We are topic agnostic”. I put it to the noble Baroness that, had the provisions in Amendment 93 been in place, first, under “Content harms” in proposed new paragraph 3(c) and (d), Meta would have been at fault; under “Contact harms” in proposed new paragraph 4(b), Meta would have been at fault; under “Conduct harms” in proposed new paragraph 5(b), Meta would have been at fault; and under “Commercial harms” in proposed new paragraph 6(a) and (b), Meta would have been at fault. That would have made things a great deal simpler.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I raised my opposition to a version of this amendment previously. For once, I was planning to keep out of the gender identity argument—although I agree with both the speech and the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes—but I feel I must make some response to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who said that the concept of gender is causing no problems in the law or among judges. I am delighted about that, but let me tell you that the concept of gender is causing a huge number of problems for many women.

The judge advises that we need to talk to young people who include trans people among their friends. I point out that I have trans people among my friends and spend a huge amount of time talking to young people. There is not just one view on this; there are lots of views. One of the problems we have to recognise is that open debate about gender and trans issues is often chilled, for fear of accusations of hate or bigotry—and, ironically, most of the misogynistic abuse that I and other women have received in recent months and years has been on this issue of being gender-critical.

I will now go back to what I was going to say. My opposition to this amendment is based on a key concern: the need to avoid fuelling a narrative of fear that posits the idea that terrible and unimaginably horrific, but rare, instances of sexual violence and murder are part of a continuum of widespread misogynistic attitudes. This can too easily align everything from online trolling and catcalling to rape and domestic abuse under the label of misogyny—hatred of women.

There is limited time because we have very major things to discuss, so I will focus my remarks. I appreciate that the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, explicitly distinguishes between sexual violence crimes and other forms of crime that may be motivated by misogynistic intent, and that it is not an attempt to create any new criminal offences, being more concerned with the police recording and reporting of the number of crimes motivated by hostility towards sex and, sometimes, gender. This, we are told, is crucial to identifying patterns of behaviour and targeting police resources, so that we can build a national picture of violence against women and girls. However, hate crime legislation generally, as echoed in this amendment, in fact means that the data collected is based almost entirely on subjective perceptions and will not allow an accurate picture to emerge.

The amendment talks of a reported crime in which

“(a) the victim or any other person perceived the alleged offender, at the time of or immediately before or after the offence, to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on sex, or (b) the victim or any other person perceived the crime to be motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility or prejudice towards persons who are of a particular sex”.

So this amendment would not help us understand data as fact but more how victims—or any other third parties—subjectively see either the motivation of the alleged offenders or the crime. To compound the issue, there is no legal or formal definition of “hostility”, so the CPS suggests that we use the everyday understanding of the word, which includes ill will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike. This can lead only to the possibility of an ever- widening set of crimes being badged as misogynistic, with the only evidence being subjective.

The practical outcomes could be severe and serious, as the amendment would alter sentencing. This means, essentially, that, if someone thinks or feels that someone else is being hateful towards them, and the hostility in carrying out the crime is based on sex and explains their offence, that is enough for that person to be locked up in prison for longer. There is also a more insidious punishment: this amendment might mean that more and more behaviour—we know that we mean especially that of men and boys—is deemed to be misogynistic, destroying the reputation of those people once they are labelled as bigots who hate women, according to this categorisation, without necessarily being branded as such in reality.

According to the campaign literature sent out ahead of this discussion, this label of hostility via sex can be used to imply far more than hostility. However minor the original crime, if it is labelled as sex-based hostility we are told that it is an almost inevitable slippery slope and that this is the kind of person who will carry out, if they are not stopped, the most heinous crimes, such as rape, sexual violence and murder. Meanwhile, HOPE not Hate sent round a missive saying that this kind of sex-hostility is a slip road to far-right extremism.

Finally, the Fawcett Society claims that this amendment will give women protection from crime and help ensure the safety of women and girls. I say that it will not: if anything, it could distract the police from the practical, difficult but essential work of on-the-ground patrolling of streets, painstaking investigations, and so on, and the courage to see through those investigations and prosecutions. It might take valuable resources for the police away from policing if they are tangled up in the reporting and monitoring of staff and data which I do not think, as I have shown, is reliable. Consider one of the most gross examples of the abuse of women and girls: the grooming gangs that operated in parts of the north-west of England. Those women and girls would not have been helped one iota had those crimes been called misogynistic. The shameful neglect in the investigation and prosecution of that incident was surely not about whether it was seen as being driven by hostility to sex. This amendment avoids the real problem, is tokenistic and will not help women at all.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I have put my name to this amendment and will speak very briefly, not least because I have the privilege of being one of the Deputy Speakers of this House. I would just remind noble Lords that we are at Report, and at Report we are not meant to give either Second Reading or Committee speeches—it is a discourtesy to the House to be discursive. That is all that needs to be said on that.

Some noble Lords may be familiar with a newspaper that is normally far too left-wing for me, the Daily Telegraph. There is an article in today’s paper by a gentleman called Charles Hymas, which says—and I have no reason to believe it is not true, since I understand that there are fairly close links between the aforementioned organ and the party in government—that there are quite a few quite senior Back-Benchers in another place who are very keen to use this amendment, assuming your Lordships pass it, to enable them to have a proper discussion in another place about this issue and to decide then, as our elected representatives, whether this case has sufficient merit to be put into law and in what manner and form that should happen. I suggest that they are rather better qualified to do that than we are.

Having said that, my Lords, I will support this amendment. I think we should send it back to another place for them to have another look. The other place is also a better place to have what can be an extremely contorted and overimaginative debate about gender and the relative merits of sex and gender.

As others have said, I am not sure that generationally we are the best-equipped assembly to opine on these subjects. That does not mean that we are not able to have a point of view, and I am aware that some noble Lords and noble Baronesses have a very strong point of view. I simply point out that, however strongly they may feel, there are a great many others of a younger generation, and down the other end, who feel differently. I support this amendment, because I think your Lordships should give the other place a chance to decide for itself.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Monday 15th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am of a mind to be opposed to the introduction of a misogyny hate crime, but your Lordships will be delighted to know that I will not be sharing my broader thoughts with the Committee at this late hour. However, there are problems that we need to be clear about before we can even have this conversation. What is our definition of misogyny here? We just assume that we are talking about it as a hatred of women, but it is not straightforward to legislate against hatred of women in 2021, when there is such a toxic debate about what our definition of a woman is. What is a woman, and who is and is not a woman? We heard a very lively discussion earlier; we in this place do not necessarily agree.

We know that somebody can simply declare themselves a woman, regardless of biological reality. We know that the debate about whether only women have cervixes has scuppered leading politicians, who seem unsure about biology in that regard. I do not say this to be glib, in case the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, thinks I am trying to stir up trouble again. I do so because it seems a genuine issue that the conflation of sex and gender—I know that the amendment does not do that; it separates them out—means that “misogyny”, as hatred of women, is not straightforward at the moment.

I also want to know which or what misogyny this amendment is trying to address. If you erase, for example, sex-based rights, which is what some feminists think is going on at the moment, is that a misogynistic outlook? Some feminists certainly argue that it is. There is certainly a huge amount of visceral and vile hatred thrown at gender-critical women, meted out by some of the gender and trans extremists—not by trans people in general, I hasten to add, but the kinds of people who drove Professor Kathleen Stock out of her job at Sussex University. They sounded misogynistic to me, but are they the target of this amendment? I am drawing attention to the fact that wanting a misogynistic hate crime does not clarify to me what the amendment is trying to do.

I understand that what I have said is contentious and that not everybody here will agree with some of the points I have made even so far. In this context, is it appropriate to get the law, let alone the police on the ground, to try to untangle what is a very toxic discussion in society and implement this? I do not know how putting that on to the police will help women.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

Would the noble Baroness perhaps accept that if she was to speak to some of the senior police officers, men and women, who have to deal with the victims of hostility and aggravated crimes, largely motivated by misogyny, and ask them what they think misogyny is, she would get a very clear response? They interact on a day-to-day basis with people who are direct victims of it.

While it is very interesting to have a “Moral Maze”-like discussion at a theoretical level, to be clear, what those of us proposing this amendment, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, want, is to do something now for the victims experiencing hostility based on misogyny. We should not be talking in airy circles about this; we need to do something.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I will try to avoid airy circles. Not long ago, I was invited to speak to a gathering of police officers of various ranks on the issue of hate crimes and I can safely say that it was a 50/50 split. As an aside, quite a number of the female officers there were supportive of me and my position, so this is not an airy-fairy, “Moral Maze” position, although it does try to have some principle.

I was about to go on to talk about policing. I understand that one of the reasons there is a sense of urgency about making misogyny a hate crime is in response to horrendous and high-profile murders and rapes of women. We are all mentioning Sarah Everard, but there are many more. I wonder whether, in fact, framing violence against women through hate will solve the problem that it says it will tackle. As far as I can see, we have laws against indecent exposure, stalking, voyeurism, sexual assault, domestic abuse and rape. They are criminal offences, largely serious, and I do not understand why an additional law would act as a further deterrent or reassure women—I do not get that. If, as some argue—I agree with them—women are having problems gaining justice for those very acts in the courts at present, why would hate crime as an aggravated offence make any difference if the crimes in question are not being policed, investigated or prosecuted satisfactorily in the first place?

When I read the literature on misogyny and hate crimes—this was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove—the theory goes that minor incidents of gross sexist behaviour are misogynistic and indisputably part of a continuum that will lead to more serious crimes. I worry, however, that there is a danger there of relativising the horrors of rape and murder and tangling up the police in events that are not as serious, meaning that they take their eye off the ball in what I think they need to be doing: policing the streets, protecting people, prosecuting and so on. I am worried that this will cause a distraction for the police from doing the very job they need to be doing.

To use one example—I have been involved in talking to people in the area—the organised networks of male grooming and the systematic abuse and rape of vulnerable young women in Rochdale and Rotherham were largely ignored by the authorities, downplayed and continually not discussed. That is what we should be discussing here. Labelling the abuse as misogynistic does not seem to me to help; I just want the authorities to do the job of investigating when women are abused. That is far more important.