Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Baroness Morgan of Cotes and Steve McCabe

Thursday 14th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

14. What steps she is taking to tackle misogynist bullying on social media.

[The Minister for Women and Equalities (Nicky Morgan)]

Bullying of any kind, whether online or offline, is absolutely unacceptable. There is also no place for misogyny or trolling in our society. My Department has set up the Stop Online Abuse website to provide women and LGBT adults with practical advice on how to recognise abuse, including on social media. I also want to echo the welcome for the report from the Women and Equalities Select Committee on transgender equality, which was published today. It makes specific recommendations for addressing online safety and the treatment of transgender people, which we will take very seriously.

[Nicky Morgan]

I and other Ministers, including my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy speak to social media providers all the time about these issues. I welcome the recent statement from a Twitter director saying that it thought it was doing better on dealing with trolls, but I think it recognised that it needed to do more.

I hope that the hon. Lady will also recognise that there are issues closer to home. She will remember the statement made by her own party leader at her party’s conference last autumn, when he had to appeal to activists. He said:

“I say to all activists, whether Labour or not, cut out the personal attacks, the cyber bullying and especially the misogynistic abuse online”.

I hope that the hon. Lady will tackle her own party in regard to this issue.

[Steve McCabe]

Will the Secretary of State tell us what evidence there is of improved data collection to give us the true scale of this abuse? What evidence is there that police officers up and down the country are receiving appropriate training to enable them to identify and deal with the perpetrators of the abuse?

[Nicky Morgan]

I will have to come back to the hon. Gentleman on the question of data collection, which I am happy to do. I suspect that some organisations are better than others. I mentioned the revenge porn helpline earlier, which clearly is monitoring and keeping data. We want to evaluate such data one year on, in February or March of this year. I have already said that what is illegal offline is also illegal online, and that has been made very clear to all police forces up and down the country. We continue to make that case to them.