Social Media: Online Abuse

Debate between Lord St John of Bletso and Baroness Shields

Wednesday 15th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shields]

I thank the noble Lord and acknowledge the importance of the tragedies that have affected a lot of young people online. I shall take forward his thoughts and come back to him. Realistically, we have in place a strong regime of recommended guidance for companies through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, and companies comply with it. I would say that today we are further along in combating child sexual abuse and exploitation online, and as new developments emerge, we will need to continue to evolve the guidance to support people and victims and to address the perpetrators of these crimes.

[Lord St John of Bletso (CB)]

My Lords, surely one of the major challenges is that of looking at what measures can be taken to address online anonymity.

[Baroness Shields]

Online anonymity is a particular problem. Online abuse is abhorrent and its consequences can be devastating, but oftentimes people are anonymous and it is difficult to track them. Unfortunately, while online abuse is always harmful it is not always illegal, so the goal of the Government is to equip people with the knowledge and the tools they need in order to be digitally resilient. That is why last week the Government announced a new duty on all schools to provide education on online relationships as part of the PSHE curriculum and have announced a cross-government internet safety strategy with a Green Paper that is due out before the summer.