Non-Consensual Sexually Explicit Images and Videos (Offences) Bill [HL]

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 13th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to support the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, on her excellent Private Member’s Bill. It is also a pleasure to follow all other speakers, with whom I agree. I hope the Minister is beginning to get a small sense of the opinion of this House and I suspect that he will hear more support for this Bill. This House has already shown in successive Bills its willingness and intent to legislate in these areas: in fact, the whole of Parliament has done so. The noble Baroness rightly paid tribute to the Revenge Porn Helpline. I pay tribute also to organisations such as Refuge and its tech abuse work, which has educated all of us in this space. In the short time available, I will say two main things.

First, I support the specifics of this Bill, which is excellently drafted, with the criminalisation not just of the creation of the images but the solicitation of that creation, the future-proofing by use of the words “otherwise capturing” and the ability to forcibly delete the images so that they are not returned to the person who committed the offence.

In the summer of 2023, this House made it very clear to the then Government, in the form of an amendment to the Online Safety Bill, that it wanted to treat small but high-harm platforms as seriously as the largest platforms. In briefings and just now, the noble Baroness talked about the platforms that host this kind of content. Yes, we want to criminalise these activities, but we will not tackle the commodification of women and violence against women and girls, as we have just heard, unless we also prevent platforms carrying this material. I was struck by an article on this Bill in this week’s House magazine and its reference to the platform 4chan:

“It was this community of people that were quite committed and technologically savvy, trying to advance the cause of deepfaking, and who had absolutely no moral qualms about it at all”.


I found out today that, early next week, the Government will announce that they have accepted Ofcom’s advice that small but high-harm platforms will not be given the most serious categorisation, in direct contravention of the amendment passed in this House.

So I say to the Minister—I appreciate that this is not for his department—that not only should he accept this Bill in its entirety, given his party’s manifesto commitment, but that, if the Government seriously want to tackle violence against women and girls, they need to be consistent across all legislation and treat the platforms carrying this content as seriously as they should be treated, so that, hopefully and eventually, the content will be something that people cannot see and cannot trade.