Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Baroness Uddin

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to stand shoulder to shoulder with my noble friend Lord Bird, and I hope that we will see this Bill to its end. I believe that it is an addition to our responsibility on equality duties

We live in an unequal society between those who have and those who live in abject poverty and deprivation. The Bill desires an outcome in which our country is fit for the next generation. I am thankful for this opportunity to consider the challenges to improve its life chances.

The pandemic has forced us to examine long-standing divisions, in which millions of children experience food poverty, homelessness, a poor standard of education, digital inequalities, lack of equal opportunities for work and an endemic level of violence and abuse, with a third of violent crimes being committed against women and girls, including in our schools, colleges and universities. Eradication of violence, including knife crimes and brutalisation of our young black men within the criminal justice system, requires radical overhaul, such as through the urgent reconsideration of the Prevent strategy, which for so long has been seen to target specific communities and has done so much to demonise Islam and Muslims.

It is my fervent hope and prayer that, in looking towards the well-being of our future generations, we will champion and positively promote our multicultural and multifaith society to ensure that all sections of our communities have a voice and say in the way we shape our country. I welcome the well-being duty being placed on public bodies and the proposed Joint Committee, as well as the Minister for Future Well-being. These structures will have to be embedded across government, and the well-being agenda will have to be mainstreamed to work in partnership with the Ministers for children and women, and other senior government Ministers, to effect the changes suggested in the Bill. Such a constructive approach would integrate the levelling-up and build back better agendas, alongside the poverty eradication, education, housing equality and environmental commitments that have been so prominent within this Government, and among the many demands made by young people who have marched and protested throughout our country in recent months.

We have an informed generation of young people. Many have taken the decision to engage in political activism. I take this incredible opportunity to salute the many hundreds of thousands of children and young people who have marched for a better future and demonstrated that they are conscious of building a safer and more equal society and country; who have engaged in political acts and want their voices heard in dialogues and the process of decision-making; and whose consciousness, understanding and appreciation of protecting the environment, and of poverty, health, civil liberties, drugs, social justice, inequalities, racism and Islamophobia, as well as international conflicts, is most profound. They are an exemplar to each of us in this House and elsewhere. This debate is about safeguarding their future well-being. As we consider the merits of this Bill in its next phase, I look forward to elaborating these points further.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, is experiencing technical difficulties, so I will call her later, when she is able to reconnect. In the meantime, I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock.

Domestic Abuse Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Baroness Uddin

Report stage
Wednesday 10th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, like everybody else who has spoken, I say that this is extremely welcome. We thank the Minister for listening to so many voices. It is great that the Government have listened, although, if I were being uncharitable, I would say they have listened somewhat belatedly. I am very pleased that the Law Commission review is now under way. I reflect that it took the influence of a very influential and effective recent Cabinet Minister to persuade her own party to listen, when so many voices have been trying to get the Government to listen over quite a long period. However, thanks are due, and thanks are given.

I am concerned that we often seem to be behind the curve when it comes to so many aspects of online harm and harassment-type behaviour in general. In today’s newspaper there was mention of a YouGov survey which has just been done. Of 1,000 women, 96% of them do not and would not report incidents of harassment to the authorities. One of them pointed out that the police can act if somebody drops litter on the street but are unable to act if somebody is harassed on the street, and that does seem wrong. I think 46% of the 1,000 ladies said, when asked why they did not report harassment, that it was because they had no belief whatever that it would change anything. That is a reflection on the various authorities and organisations that are meant to help victims of harassment. If they feel like that, there is clearly something wrong.

The noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, mentioned the extraordinary small market town somewhere in the United Kingdom where no fewer than 70 women have had intimate images shared on an online forum where somebody commented that they are “traded like Pokémon cards”. What must it feel like, as a woman or a man— as a human being—to have intimate images of yourself traded like Pokémon cards? On this online forum if you have an interest in a particular town you can message people on the forum who circulate these images and ask: “Do you have anybody from this particular town or who went to this particular school?” That is really shameful; the fact it is going on shames us all.

I am pleased that we are, belatedly, in catch-up mode. But I find it excruciatingly embarrassing and unacceptable that victims are suffering in many different ways, while Her Majesty’s Government and Parliament occasionally appear to be dithering over regulation and legislating. In doing that we are letting ourselves down, but far more importantly, we are letting the victims down.

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lords who have spoken, and I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and, of course, the Government, for accepting these necessary amendments.

At the outset, I also record my thanks to Dr Ann Olivarius of McAllister Olivarius, a very eminent lawyer who, about a decade ago, began her campaign against so-called revenge porn. Her outstanding work, both here and in the US, has definitely made a very significant contribution to the fact that we have had legislation for the last five years and it is a criminal offence to share sexual images without consent.

I welcome this amendment to extend the offence of disclosing

“private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress”

to an individual who appears in the photograph or film— known as a “revenge porn” offence—so as to include “threats to disclose”. One in 14 adults has experienced threats to share intimate images or films of themselves. Young women aged 18-34 are disproportionately impacted by this form of abuse, with one in seven reporting that she has experienced such threats.

Like other noble Lords, I commend Refuge’s The Naked Threat research, which found that the vast majority—72%—of threats experienced by women were made by partners or ex-partners, making it a clear domestic abuse or domestic violence issue. Therefore, the Domestic Abuse Bill is not only the right legislative vehicle for what is clearly a crime related to domestic violence or abuse but a piece of legislation that would allow the Government to make these required changes imminently. As such, I am very grateful for that.

Some 83% of women threatened by their current or former partners experience other forms of abuse alongside these threats. One in 10 women threatened by a current or former partner felt suicidal as a result of the threats, and 83% said that the threats damaged their mental health or emotional well-being. More than one in seven of these women felt a continuous risk of physical violence because of these threats. Only one in three women felt empowered to report this behaviour to the police, and, of those women, less than 14% said that they had received a good response. I am also deeply concerned about the lack of reports coming from black and other minority women.

As I have said previously in this Chamber, perpetrators of domestic abuse are increasingly using technology and the internet to control and abuse their partners and ex-partners. Threats to share images are used to control, coerce and abuse when they are in a relationship, and, after they have separated, this form of abuse is disproportionately perpetrated against younger women. Survivors of this form of abuse lack the vital legal protection that they need, with the police often telling survivors—or making them believe—that they cannot take any action until the abuser has shared the images, leaving survivors in fear and enabling perpetrators to use these threats to control them.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, I thank Refuge, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Barnardo’s, among others, which recommend making threats to share intimate images a crime, and extending the offence of controlling and coercive behaviour in an intimate family relationship to remove the cohabitation requirement. This is most welcome; it would therefore cover post-separation abuse, which would protect 4.4 million adults who have experienced this form of abuse.

Young people are the group most likely to be in an abusive relationship. A survey of 13 to 17 year-olds found that 25% of girls and 18% of boys reported having experienced some form of physical violence from an intimate partner. However, the Children’s Society found that 77%—a majority—of local authorities that responded to its FoI request do not have a policy or protocol in place for responding to under-16s who experience teenage relationship abuse, with just 39% of local authorities providing specialist support services for under-16s and 26% of local authorities providing no specialist support for this age group. Tragically, 500 children—mostly teenagers, but some as young as eight years old—were victims of image-based abuse.

The UK Safer Internet Centre is a partnership of three leading charities, including the Internet Watch Foundation. It reported an increase in the number of young people trying to view sexual abuse materials online, and that in just one month of lockdown its analysts blocked 8.8 million attempts by UK users to access such images and videos. We continue to see a rise in the number of children being groomed online into producing self-generated indecent images. I shudder to think of the underreporting, particularly among young people from black and minority-ethnic communities.

Can the noble Lord say what action the Government are considering to influence, inform and educate children and, more widely, the general population? What research, if any, have the Government undertaken into the impact of online abuse of women and intersectional online abuse of women from black and minority communities?