Online Safety Bill

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Lords Chamber

Thousands of children over the years have been let down. We know the harm that is caused by pornography. We legislated in 2017 to stop that harm, yet if the Ofcom road map is accurate it could be two or three more years before pornography is regulated. That is unacceptable. We must ensure that we do all we can to bring in age verification as quickly as possible.

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I too add my support to Amendments 123A, 142, 161, 183, 184, 185, 297, 300 and 306. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Bethell and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for putting before us such a comprehensive list of amendments seeking to protect children from a host of online harms, including online pornography. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who, through her Amendment 185, draws our attention to the horrifying material that is prohibited in the offline world though is inexplicably legal in the online world. I also lend my support to Amendment 306 in the name of noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, in relation to the swift implementation of age verification for pornography. I am sorry to have jumped the queue.

I spoke at Second Reading on the harms of pornography to children, but so much more evidence has come to my notice since then. I recently wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph about age verification, which resulted in my inbox being absolutely flooded by parents saying, “Please keep going”. There are probably noble Lords here who feel that we have spoken enough about pornography over the last few weeks, but anybody who has watched any of this would, I am afraid, beg to differ. I hope noble Lords will forgive me for quoting from another email I received in response to that article, which is relevant to today’s debate. A young man wrote:

“When I first visited online porn, I was about 12”.


Incidentally, that is the average age at the first exposure. He said:

“I can remember feeling that this was ‘wrong’ but also that it was something that all boys do. I had no idea about masturbation, but that soon followed, and I was able to shake off the incredibly depressive sensation of having done something wrong after finishing by finding many online resources informing me that the practice was not bad, and actually quite healthy. Only over the past 3 years have I been able to tackle this addiction and I am now 31.


I will try and keep this letter as succinct as possible, but I believe the issue of pornography is at the root of so many issues in society that nobody, no man at least, seems willing to speak about it openly. If you research what happens in the brain of a person viewing pornography”,


especially when so young,

“you see that the dopamine receptors get so fried it’s almost as bad as a heroin experience and far more addictive. Far more addictive, in that I can just log on to my phone and open Pandora’s box at any time, anywhere, and it’s all free.

I’ll tell you that I became alienated from women, in that I became afraid of them. Perhaps out of guilt for looking at pornography. Instead of having the confidence to ask a girl out and experience an innocent teenage romance, I would be in my room looking at all sorts of images.


The human brain requires novelty, mine does at least, so soon you find yourself veering off from the boring vanilla porn into much darker territories.


The internet gives you access to literally everything you could possibly imagine, and the more you get sucked down the rabbit hole, the more alienated you become from your peers. You are like an addict searching for your next hit, your whole world revolves around your libido and you can’t actually look at a woman without fantasising about sex.


Then if you do manage to enter into a relationship, the damage this causes is beyond comprehension. Instead of living each moment with your partner, you end up in a dual relationship with your phone, masturbating behind their back. In fact, your partner can’t keep up with the porn, and you end up with issues with your erections and finding her attractive.


Whenever you would watch information about porn on TV or the internet, you would be told that it should be encouraged and is healthy. You end up trying to watch porn with your partner, and all the weird psychological ramifications that has. You go further down the rabbit-hole, but for some reason nothing feels right and you have this massive crippling depression following you wherever you go in life”.


I hope noble Lords will forgive me for reading that fairly fully. It is a tiny illustration, and it is typical of how pornography steals men’s childhoods and their lives. I discussed this with young men recently, and one told me that, because he had been in Dubai—where there is no access to it—for a month, he feels much better and plans to keep away from this addictive habit. When young men reach out to Peers because they have nowhere else to go, we must surely concede that we have failed them. We have failed generations of boys and girls—girls who are afraid to become women because of what they see—and, if we do not do something now, we will fail future generations.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill’s commitment to protecting children online, yet, like many noble Lords, I fear that it is not yet robust enough. I am extremely concerned about the current unfettered access that children have to online pornography—pornography that is violent, misogynistic, racist and deeply disturbing in its content. For example, analysis of videos recommended to first-time users on three of the most popular porn sites, Pornhub, Xvideos, and xHamster, found that one in every eight titles described sexual activities that constitutes sexual violence as defined by the WHO. In most cases, that violence is perpetrated against women, and, in those videos, the women respond to that violence either with pleasure or neutrality. Incest was the most frequent form of sexual violence recommended to users. The second most common category recommended was that of physical aggression and sexual assault. This is not the dark web, or some far corner of the internet; these are mainstream porn sites, and they are currently accessed every month by 1.4 million UK children.

Research released yesterday by the Children’s Commissioner states that the average age at which children first see pornography is 13. Accessing this brutal and degrading content has a devastating impact on their psychological, emotional, neurological and sexual well-being. I recommend a YouTube video called “Raised on Porn”, if noble Lords want to see the damage it can do. Boys grow up to believe that girls must enjoy violent sex acts, and girls are growing up to believe that they must enjoy painful and humiliating acts, such as anal sex and strangulation. Anecdotal evidence shows that the 5,000% increase in the number of girls going through puberty now wishing to identify as male is at least partly driven by seeing this vile porn and coming to the conclusion that they would rather not be women if that is what sex involves. Yet the Online Safety Bill does little to address this. While it includes regulations on age verification, pornography will not be defined as a primary priority content until secondary legislation. Furthermore, according to the Ofcom implementation road map, multiple consultations and processes also need to be undertaken. As we have heard from other noble Lords, it may not be until 2027 or 2028 before we see robust age verification. We cannot wait that long.

Mainstream porn consists of acutely hardcore content, which, although it does not meet the narrow definition of illegal content, is none the less extremely harmful, especially when viewed by children. Depictions of sexual coercion, abuse and exploitation of vulnerable women and children, the incest porn I have already mentioned, humiliation, punishment, torture and pain, and child sexual abuse are commonplace. In the offline world, that content would be prohibited under the British Board of Film Classification guidelines, yet it remains online with no provisions in the Bill to address the staggering gap between the online and offline worlds. That is despite the Government recognising in their own research that

“there is substantial evidence of an association between the use of pornography and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women.”

Amending the Bill to protect women and children need not be a difficult task. As many noble Lords have mentioned, provisions were made to address those issues in the Digital Economy Act, although they were not implemented. We must not make those mistakes again and allow the Bill to pass without ensuring robust protections for children and society at large.

National Women’s Sports

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, like every other noble Lord, I express my pride in both the Lionesses and England’s women, who put in such a gutsy performance in the world championship, losing by such a small margin against New Zealand.

As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said in his excellent opening remarks, during their teenage years girls drop out of sport at three times the rate of boys, yet girls need load-bearing exercise even more than boys during those years. It is the best time to build bone density, helping to protect us from osteoporosis later in life. The push from our sports councils to get more females into exercising and keep us there is not just a social move towards some sort of sporting equality. It is important for our health and well-being, including the impact on the NHS budget.

Football is the most popular team sport in the UK, with millions of people playing regularly. It is a “gender-affected activity”, in the words of the Equality Act, meaning that mixed-sex play would not be fair for females because males are stronger and faster, even when they are the same size. From the age of 12, boys and girls play separately to give females fair and safe play. Even in primary schools, it is common to have girls’ teams and boys’ teams. A 10 year-old girl will tell you that boys will not pass to girls and that she prefers playing with other girls because boys are too rough. The effects of male puberty are clear: more muscle, bigger heart and lung capacity, denser bones, stiffer tendons and the rest.

In the school playground or in the park, you will see boys, not girls, having an impromptu football game. The result is that for every female playing football in the UK, there are nine males. That is almost a whole team. If football is to become a girls’ game too, it is obvious that girls and young women need their own teams. They also need role models. After the success of the England women, girls can see they can be female and sporty, and that can be life-changing.

Here is the problem. Since 2015 the Football Association has had a policy that males may play in women’s teams if they lower their testosterone or, in some cases, even if they do not. Lowering testosterone will slow them down a little but does not reverse male puberty and it certainly does not remove male performance advantage in sport. An average male runs 10% faster than an average female. In a dash to the ball, he needs to be only half a metre in front every time and she will never get a touch. Up to the age of 18, even that requirement is absent. The FA’s current policy says that under-18s may play in the team of “their reassigned/ affirmed gender”, so although talented girls can be forced to drop out of boys’ teams after the age of 11, boys who say they are “girls inside” get to join a girls’ team.

This year the England Universities women’s football squad has a trans-identifying male player, a 30-something six-foot-tall post-pubertal male who now identifies as a woman, in goal, where size advantage really counts. If you had to play them, would you not want a trans-identifying male player in your women’s team too, in order to level the playing field a little?

Last autumn the UK’s Sports Council Equality Group published new guidance on transgender inclusion in sport. It said that the inclusion of trans-identifying males in female sport could not be balanced with fairness, and in many cases safety, for females. This summer English and Welsh rugby reinstated female-only teams, though Scottish Rugby has yet to follow, but football is not there yet.

Women’s football was huge in the early 20th century but was outlawed by the FA in 1921 and remained so for 50 years. Now, once again, women’s football has a chance. Let us hope the FA will not hand it to the boys this time.

Freedom of Speech

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, the past year or so has seen a troubling increase in intolerance and the so-called cancel culture. Many of us have been, at best, naive about what is happening at universities and among activist groups. A number of recent cases have focused on attempting to silence those who are gender-critical or biological realists. Many of them are women, from MPs Rosie Duffield and Joanna Cherry to academics Raquel Rosario Sánchez and Professor Jo Phoenix, barrister Allison Bailey and tax expert Maya Forstater, all forced to take legal action to protect their reputations and livelihoods. They also include artists, such as Jess de Wahls; only this week, dancer Rosie Kay was forced out of the charity that she set up for daring to express her view that biological sex is real.

These women have been intimidated, harassed and bullied for simply expressing opinions that everyone once took for granted: that women are adult human females, and that biological sex matters. Professor Kathleen Stock has been hounded out of her job at Sussex University for her belief that biological sex is binary and immutable—a belief that I would call a scientific fact and a fact of life. Professor Stock was accused of making trans people feel unsafe. Why should scientific facts make anyone feel unsafe?

Trans people do not all think alike. What about those who agree with Professor Stock, such as Dr Debbie Hayton? How do they feel? Debbie Hayton is a transsexual who transitioned in 2012. She has written extensively in the press, and I find her perspective rather refreshing. She has defended Professor Stock and written in support of JK Rowling. She has little time for what she calls “gender identity ideology”. Her views could be summarised in a line from one of her own articles: that

“gender identity is bollocks; you either have them or you don’t.”

It is fair to say that Hayton divides opinion with such views, but should she not have the right to express them? No, according to what she called the “transgender thought police”. She may have a point but, while they may police thoughts, they are not necessarily transgender themselves. They use transgender rights to attack and cancel others.

You do not need to search too far on social media to observe the hate directed at Hayton, presumably for being the wrong sort of trans person:

“Lord Haw-Haw Hayton, the quisling wannabe … Debbie Hayton is a monster, a completely twisted human being”.


Sadly, such abuse is all too frequent, as are death threats. She gets those too:

“Debbie Hayton is a traitor to her community and should be afforded the proper respect as such.”


That tweet continued with images of three large knives. However, while her attackers hide behind anonymous profiles, Hayton campaigns under her own name. She is a science teacher, and it is not difficult to identify the school where she teaches. She is therefore vulnerable to being cancelled, not only on social media but in her employment. The chatter on Twitter shows that pressure is being applied:

“It amazes me that Hayton’s employer still employs her in any capacity in education and that the relevant anti-terrorist policing department hasn’t acted.”


Someone else then added:

“They’re as transphobic as she is. I’ve tried to complain a few times, they just said, ‘She’s just concerned.’”


Earlier this year, Hayton added her name to a letter criticising the decision by the Women’s Prize for Fiction to longlist a book written by a trans woman. One of her opponents tweeted the school where she teaches directly:

“How do you continue to endorse Debbie Hayton when she is happy to sign a truly transphobic letter? Your continued support for her is transphobia.”


I commend Hayton’s courage for being prepared to say what she thinks. I also praise her school for standing firm.

In many cases, employers have responded to such criticism rather differently. When we ask ourselves why more people—and, indeed, more trans people—do not speak out in support of those such as JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock and defend the rights of women, maybe we have an answer. Campaigning might be part and parcel of a democratic society, but it rarely pays the bills or puts food on the table. This debate is not a dispute between women on one side and trans people on the other. Stock and Hayton appear to be on the same side, and are both attacked for making rational arguments. It is not just abuse on social media, as if that were not bad enough. Their freedom of speech is threatened in part because their livelihoods are threatened. That is wrong. Professor Stock was hounded out of her job at Sussex University. Hayton hangs on to hers, but what are we doing as a society to protect their right to speak and not be punished for it?

Criticism of gender identity ideology is not an attack on trans people. It is not transphobic to support women’s rights. Trans people such as Debbie Hayton make this very clear. Hayton has described it as an authoritarian, quasi-religious cult—one where you must believe or be thrown out. As she rightly points out, I am an apostate. We must do better for Dr Hayton, Professor Stock and anyone willing to stand against an ideology. The rights of women and the safeguarding of children may depend on it.

Social Media: News

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for introducing this debate. I do not think any of us can claim that this is the most digitally aware workplace in the country. Indeed, when talking about Twitter with a colleague here the other day, he asked me how many followers he had. I had to explain that as he was not signed up and did not have a Twitter account, he did not actually have any followers. I do not think he is unrepresentative.

I cannot pretend to be a digital whizz myself, but I am on Twitter. Somehow, without knowing how, I have managed to set up my Twitter account to feed automatically to my Facebook page, which I am rather pleased with. I have just over 5,000 followers, which pales into insignificance compared to, say, the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, who, with nearly 5.5 million followers, understands the power of communicating directly and influencing a very large audience. With 500 million tweets posted every day and 1.33 billion people active daily on Twitter, the power of online platforms cannot be ignored.

I wish to focus my remarks on how this revolution is affecting public life. Social media has made communication with those of us in public life much easier. More than 70% of UK adults own a smartphone, which can be used from any location to send messages directly to the social media accounts of politicians and candidates. My interest, as noble Lords may be aware, is as chair of Women2Win, which encourages and supports female Conservative candidates to stand for election. A recent Fawcett Society survey of women in public life found that most women failed to report abuse as they did not think the platforms would act. This is wrong. They should take tough action against abusers.

I very much welcome the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s recent inquiry, which showed, among other things, that Conservative candidates, especially women, were more likely to be the subject of intimidatory behaviour than candidates representing other parties. This is worrying. It is hard enough to get women to stand for public office, and all barriers need to be addressed. If they are not, we will be left with a political culture that does not reflect the society it should represent, with serious implications for our democracy.

Let me give your Lordships a real example—one of many. During the election campaign in June, the Ealing Central and Acton Conservative candidate was met daily outside her home by a large group of Momentum and Labour activists yelling at her, and I quote—and please, my Lords, forgive the unparliamentary language and block your ears if you are sensitive or easily offended—“Fucking Tory cunt”. This young woman has a young child. How can this be acceptable? How does this not deter other mothers from stepping up? Her activists and volunteers were routinely spat at. They told an Asian activist that she deserved to have her throat slit and to be in the ground for being a Conservative—and much, much more, especially on social media.

Standing for election and public office for whatever political party should be recognised and celebrated as a noble, honourable and responsible action to take. This abusive behaviour is fuelled by the anonymity which social media platforms provide. This is just one example of many where, during an attempt to take part in the democratic process, a candidate was subject to abuse, intimidation, libel and slander. Civil, criminal and electoral laws were broken, yet no action was taken. Online platforms have a responsibility to play their part in preventing this in future.