Baroness Massey of Darwen
Main Page: Baroness Massey of Darwen (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has reintroduced an online safety Bill. She is right to do so, and I admire her persistence.
As we know, issues of online safety change day by day. We need to be vigilant in protecting children from violent and pornographic images. As the noble Baroness said, there is still a long way to go, and she has listed some of the problems. I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and very much appreciated his speech. He mentioned two things with which I fundamentally agree. One is human decency; I would also call it human dignity. Human dignity is being defiled by the inappropriate influence of such things as online violence and pornography. I also agree with much of what he said about legislation.
I shall not repeat the persuasive arguments of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, who set the scene admirably, but I want to make a few points and will suggest an amendment to the Bill in Committee, to which I shall come later.
The internet, with its related components, is a wonderful tool. I would guess that most of us here have benefited from it in some way. However, like any other tool, it can be dangerous in the wrong hands and should be used with care. We are talking about child protection and, I would maintain, of education for parents but also for children to enable them to resist pressure. I shall come to that in a moment.
I am grateful to those who have forcefully expressed their concern and agitated about the issue of online safety: for example, the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, Reg Bailey, Claire Perry MP, Helen Goodman MP and Tanya Byron. I am also pleased that the Government have acknowledged the dangers inherent to children. There have been some developments, including a progress report in May 2013 on the Bailey review. The Prime Minister’s speech from July 2013 has been mentioned already, and it is sad that Tesco was allowed to get away with it for so long, despite the Prime Minister’s speech, given its influence on the internet.
Helen Goodman, the shadow Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, welcomed the initiatives but she criticised, as I would, the “woeful” contribution of £250,000 from the industry for the Internet Watch Foundation and the fact that internet service providers are still refusing to put filters on as a default for all customers. Their scheme means that there will not be total coverage until 2018, at the earliest, and that there is no effective age verification. I remember that when the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, introduced the Second Reading of an online safety Bill in November last year, I quoted from a book by Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn. The same quote is worth repeating. They said that a child of 11 in Britain today may have, in their bedroom,
“a music system, TV, phone, text messaging, mobile phone, computer, instant messaging, voice over internet protocol, email, games console, DVD or VCR”,
and “an MP3 player”. All these devices are seductive and can become obsessive.
I was interested in a speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, during Committee on the Children and Families Bill. As some noble Lords may know, the noble Baroness recently made a film called “InRealLife”. In making that film, she interviewed hundreds of young people and sifted through research to try to find the extent of the influence of online devices. The results are chilling and I want to give, briefly, a flavour of her concerns. She said during the debate that,
“young people need additional help to navigate a world in which the very concept and experience of growing up has changed completely”.
She also said that we should examine,
“the role of the internet and social media in sex and relationship education and in online bullying and harassment”.—[Official Report, 11/11/13; col. GC 207.]
Yet guidance to schools on sex and relationships education has not been updated for 13 years. An amendment tabled to the Children and Families Bill by my noble friends Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, seeks support for updating that guidance.
I worry about statements such as that which said that government should trust teachers to deliver the education that pupils need and adjust it to the modern world, or that top-down diktats are not the way to deal with changes in the swift advance of technology. This is rather naive. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, found in her research and interviews that teachers were crying out for a new level of information. She suggested that very soon, we shall have an entire generation that has learnt its sexual norms from hard-core pornography, friendship rules from Facebook and self-image from dubious online images. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, was absolutely right to focus on the importance of relationships.
I have just read that TalkTalk has said:
“There is no silver bullet when it comes to internet safety and TalkTalk thinks of internet safety as the road safety of our children’s generation; it requires a range of different inventions, and the use of technical tools needs to be supported by awareness raising and education for parents”,
and young adults. It is also engaged with other broadband companies to ensure that there are resources for parents and children to combat the excesses. That is good, but what back-up will there be?
It will not surprise noble Lords to hear that I would suggest an amendment to this excellent little Bill to include a new clause saying that we do not just have a duty to educate parents about online safety but a duty to educate teachers and young people. I hope here to reassure my noble friend Lady Dean. In her 2008 report, Tanya Byron suggested that as well as reducing the availability of, and access to, harmful and inappropriate material, we should build children’s resilience to the material to which they may be exposed—a very important aspect of this argument—so that they have the confidence and skills to navigate the online world more safely, and to form real relationships rather than online relationships. Ofsted, too, has recently expressed concern at the lack of teaching of these skills of resistance in personal, social and health issues in schools.
There are some resources for schools to teach about the internet but I would prefer to examine those closely to see how hard-hitting they are. The internet is hard-hitting and the response needs to be hard-hitting. It would also be useful to check on the current status of teacher training for child protection, but that is an issue for the Department for Education, and I will take it up with the department. It is not enough to leave this issue to parents; I say that sadly but we must be realistic. Society as a whole, and its legislators, must play a part if we are not to leave our children vulnerable.