Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Baroness Vere of Norbiton and Lord Swinfen

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Swinfen (Con)]

My Lords, I have one quick question: does this apply to men wearing kilts as well as to women wearing skirts?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

My Lords, I can address that question very quickly: yes, it does. This is a non-gender-specific piece of legislation.

Amendment 4 would create a further offence of disclosing an upskirt image to another person without the consent of the person in the image. It would also provide for two defences for this offence: namely, that the disclosure of the image was necessary for the purposes of preventing or detecting crime, or that the image was not disclosed with the intent of disclosing an image of another person’s genitals, buttocks or underwear.

The Government share the concerns around the onward sharing of upskirt images and understand the very real harm that this causes victims. It is important to send a clear message that sharing such images without consent is unacceptable and causes humiliation, alarm and distress. It is therefore important that we ensure that the law is sufficiently robust to protect victims from this disturbing practice. However, the Bill is intended to close a small gap in the law around the taking of upskirt images, which is just one aspect of a far wider problem. Legislating for the non-consensual sharing of intimate or naked images, including upskirt images, is a far more complex issue than the offences covered by the Bill.

That is why the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice committed in the other place to ask the Law Commission to review the taking and sharing of all non-consensual intimate images. This will be a broad review looking at how technological change has enabled new types of harmful behaviour and how the law needs to evolve to tackle it. The Ministry of Justice is currently working with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Law Commission to consider how best to take this important and wide-ranging piece of work forward. This will build on the detailed and insightful report on online and offensive communications published by the Law Commission on 1 November. The report makes several recommendations about how the criminal law could be reformed to tackle abusive and harmful online communications.