Victims and Courts Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 14; I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Polak, and noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for adding their names to it. It seeks to clarify the definition of a “crime of violence” in the criminal injuries compensation scheme when it refers to the abuse of a child that has happened online. I hope there will be a response to my arguments not dissimilar to the Minister’s response to Amendment 2—namely, that there appears to be a gap that is worthy of being looked into properly and systematically.

Survivors of technology-facilitated child sexual abuse—I am afraid that it has an acronym, TCSA—and other coercive online sexual offences may be refused compensation under the criminal injuries compensation scheme on the basis that the injury did not result from a “crime of violence”, despite the seriousness of the abuse and the criminal offences involved. Amendment 14 seeks to clarify that cases that involve “coercion”, “domination” or “compelled” sexual acts fall within the scope of the scheme.

I am afraid that it will probably not surprise your Lordships that the scale of online child sex abuse is going up dramatically. Over 7,000 offences of sexual communication with a child were recorded in 2023-24, and 122,768 child sexual abuse and exploitation offences were recorded in 2024, of which almost half—42%—had an online element. The criminal injuries compensation scheme obviously cannot accept all the applications made to it for support. Year on year, it has increasingly not been allowing some of the applications that are made. Nevertheless, the number of applications for support involving sexual abuse and sexual assault is going up even more quickly. Some 1,601 applicants who reported sexual assault were refused compensation in 2024-25. The number of refusals under this threshold has increased by just over one-quarter in two years. However, the scheme does not record detailed offence categories, so we do not know exactly how many of those referred to child sexual abuse situations.

To illustrate, I will briefly give an example of exactly what this involves. We are working with a Northern Ireland-based charity called the Marie Collins Foundation, which is particularly focused on trying to help victims of these offences. The foundation recently supported a child who was subjected to sustained online sexual coercion by an adult offender who used manipulation and threats to compel the child to perform sexual acts via digital communication. Over time, the offender established control through grooming, emotional manipulation and threats to expose the child if they did not comply with further sexual demands. The abuse caused significant psychological harm, including anxiety, shame and trauma, consistent with other forms of child sexual abuse.

When the victim applied to the criminal injuries compensation scheme, the claim was initially refused on the basis that the injury did not arise from a crime of violence. But the decision was subsequently overturned on appeal, recognising the seriousness of the abuse and the harm it caused. The case illustrates the uncertainty in how coercive online sexual abuse of children is interpreted within the scheme and the additional burden it places on victims, who have to pursue appeals to the scheme to try to get their case heard.

Amendment 14 seeks to provide clarity by confirming that cases that involve coercion, domination or compelled sexual acts, including those facilitated online, fall within the scope of the scheme. The amendment seeks to provide clarity rather than an expansion of the scheme. It would simply ensure that cases involving coercion, domination or compelled sexual acts, including those facilitated online, are recognised as crimes of violence for the purposes of compensation. This would help the survivors of serious sexual abuse and ensure they are not excluded due to uncertainty over the interpretation of the scheme.

I hope that we do not have any children in the Public Gallery at the moment. I will just briefly describe what some of this involves online. I have already mentioned blackmail, coercion, threats, domination, and emotional and psychological abuse. There is the creation and sharing of sexual images, livestreamed sexual activity and other sexual acts, fear, loss of autonomy, erosion of agency and long-term psychological harm. The children are sometimes asked or invited to insert various objects into parts of their body. Some of the things that happen are simply unspeakable. The purpose of the amendment is to draw this to the attention of the Government and to ask that this be looked at carefully and seriously, not least because, as we know, in so many cases happening in the online world, the volume and types of abuse are increasing exponentially.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 14, alongside that of my noble friend Lord Russell, and he has adequately explained the gap.

I started, unfortunately, looking at child sexual abuse in 2012. Unfortunately, in the period since then, I have had the misfortune to look at a great deal of child sexual abuse and I say that it is an act of violence against the person in the image.

While the noble Lord, Lord Russell, was speaking, I remembered one of the very first experiences I had. I filmed an interview with a young girl at the moment she realised that the person online, who she thought was her lover, was indeed a groomer. In the next moment, she realised that she had been recorded, and in the next moment, she realised that the recording had been shared. In those moments, I watched a heartbreak, faith-break and trust-break. That young child tried to commit suicide twice in the following summer. We were able to get her help and, thankfully, she is now a survivor and not a victim. I am standing up only to stay that what happens online does not stay online. What happens online is violence. What happens to children online must not be ignored by the law.

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 14 and there is not much to add, other than to pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for all the work she has done over many years in this area and to support the noble Lord, Lord Russell.

To make it very clear, this amendment is not trying to radically expand the compensation scheme. Instead, it is asking the Secretary of State to assess whether certain forms of online child sexual abuse should be recognised as crimes of violence when they involve coercion or threats, domination or control, or the compelled creation and sharing of sexual images and sexual acts directed by an offender.

The amendment is therefore targeted, proportionate and legally defensible. It recognises that violence is not always physical. As we have heard, the reality of online coercion is that, when a child is threatened with the exposure of images, blackmailed into producing further images or directed in real time to perform sexual acts online, the child is not acting freely. They are acting under coercion, fear and domination. The absence of physical proximity does not make the abuse any less real, nor does it lessen the psychological injuries suffered by the child. Therefore, I suggest that it is our duty to protect children who are subjected to such abuse, and this amendment represents an important step towards strengthening those protections.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti’s amendment. We discussed this in Committee. My involvement, like that of the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, is through the experience of the Post Office Horizon scandal. In those cases, we saw computer evidence put before the court with the presumption that it could not be faulty or in any way questioned. I accept that the Government started a consultation on trying to update the present law. That was last April and I think that, like all these things, it has been put in the “too hard to deal with” category, but as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, has just said, other jurisdictions and other countries have moved ahead on this. It is, I have to say, a challenge for any Government, in the sense that the rapid rate of change in our technology throws up these challenges to any system. However, when there is a situation whereby a body such as the Post Office not only used the law but actually pressed it and persecuted people in a very hard and uncaring way, we get the scandals that face us today, with the Post Office scandal.

It is still going on. We now have the first of the Capture cases, which was the system before Horizon, going to the Court of Appeal. Even though, when I first exposed this, the Post Office had no information on this system, we were helped to put together, through various campaigners and individuals who came forward, the details of the Capture system. It was not a network system like Horizon, but still a system that was reliant, in those days, on corrupted floppy disks, and the program was wrong. The Government’s position has been that these cases should go to the CCRC. I think that there are fewer than 30 cases in this category. Even though the Government have now agreed to pay compensation to the Capture cases, the first case is going to the Court of Appeal.

Strangely, for some reason the Post Office has taken it on itself to oppose this case. No doubt we will hear from Ministers—I accept this is not my noble friend the Minister’s responsibility—that the Post Office is at arm’s length and therefore a decision has to be taken on what it does with cases such as this. But with the Horizon scandal we saw the Post Office spend somewhere in excess of £100 million of public money to defend the indefensible. I am not suggesting that it will spend that much on this case, but it seems to be carrying on the argument that the computer cannot be wrong.

To me and other campaigners, a clear precedent has been set on this and those cases should be set aside and overturned as the Horizon cases were. In one case going before the court, the individual is dead but her elderly husband is now facing a longer wait and yet another fight, with the Post Office using public money. As I say, when I and other campaigners first exposed Capture, the Post Office said that it had nothing on it, but it now seems very quickly to have found a good reason to oppose this case. That is why an urgent change needs to happen, as my noble friend has outlined.

I join others in thanking my noble friend the Minister for her engagement on this issue. She realises that this needs to be addressed and the constructive way she has engaged with us on it should be commended. I hope we can get some change and that, with the wider issues arising from not just this but the Capture case, the Government think before again allowing the Post Office to go down this blind alley of defending the indefensible. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I join the Minister’s fan club and thank her for her engagement on this, which has really helped get this to a better place. I am grateful for that. I believe we will hear from her what the Government’s plan is, but can she also assure me on a couple of points?

First, whatever the new process is to be, how will a person subject to a glitch or misinformation assert their case without having proper access to the system from which the evidence emerged? How will we ensure that the court is quick to understand and question the validity of the information and the system that produced it, and how will we educate the legal profession on the depth and breadth of information that seems plausible but is false? How will we do all that in sufficient time to save the next set of victims?

I too recognise the problems raised by the Minister in those meetings around the ubiquity of computers, but there is an equal and opposite concern that, in an age of AI where hallucinations, deepfakes and melded information are a norm, if we are willing to continue with the presumption, as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, said, that information from a computer is reliable, that not only is untrue but creates distrust in the law. When this moment has passed, could there perhaps be a piece of work looking forward to challenge the presumption in law in a more careful and considered way, which this quick fix does not quite reach?

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti and the three other noble Lords who signed Amendment 21. I also support Amendment 22. Concerning Amendment 21, mention has been made of the Post Office/Horizon scandal. As we all now know, this was a very defective computer. The law must in future be on the side of truth and accuracy, in relation to computers or to anything else.