Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill

Baroness Barker Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, for the clear way in which he introduced this legislation. I too congratulate my colleague in another place, Wera Hobhouse, on taking the opportunity to legislate on an offence which is at the moment rarely prosecuted—yet the behaviour seems to be growing. She has given us the opportunity to put together legislation which, if we get it right, will create a deterrent. That will be an important thing for us to do.

Before turning to the specifics of the Bill, I want to commend the Government for taking up this matter when Wera Hobhouse’s Bill was hijacked in another place. I simply make this observation: by their nature, Private Members’ Bills often deal with matters which are of high significance to very few people. There is a group of Conservative MPs, mostly white men, who take pride in shooting down Private Members’ Bills like some Friday morning sport. That is nasty. The Prime Minister’s swift response is welcome but it really should not be necessary.

I have been discussing this Bill in my office, like many other Members of your Lordships’ House, I imagine—particularly the women Members. My noble friend Lady Hamwee told me that she remembered being shocked while she was a student at Girton, which is three miles outside Cambridge, when female students were warned that someone who was giving lifts to hitchhikers was using a mirror on his car floor to look up the skirts of passengers. There are many reasons not to hitchhike but that was another one, so this is not a new issue. It is just that the role of technology has made a qualitative difference. Today, this crime has the potential to cause much greater harm to victims because images can be taken more easily and shared more widely than in the past. That compounds the violation of privacy that takes place at first. The points made by my noble friend Lady Burt on behalf of Women’s Aid were striking and to the point.

This is not a political Bill; we all share the ambition to draw up legislation which offers the greatest possible deterrence. Within that, I think it is agreed that we need legislation which is sufficiently robust in the punishments it includes but also has the flexibility to enable law enforcement agencies and so on to make it work in practice. The Bill comes to your Lordships’ House having been debated in another place under its Public Bill Committee procedure. If only for the ease of reading its discussions in Hansard, I prefer the way that is done in another place. I found it very helpful to hear people such as Gina Martin, who was a victim of this vile behaviour, set out in some detail the reasons why she and her legal team came up with their draft legislation, and the assumptions that they put behind it. That having been done, your Lordships will have the opportunity to test during our deliberations whether the definition—the technical specification—of this offence of voyeurism, as set out in Clause 1(2), is, first, sufficiently comprehensive now and, secondly, whether it will stand the test of time. We live in an age when technology changes very rapidly.

In the Public Bill Committee, it was also helpful to understand the context in which the Bill sits and the work of the Law Commission in looking at changes to definitions of hate crime, but particularly to understand the difference between this Bill and the Bill on revenge porn. I was involved in a minor way in the passage of the revenge porn legislation, along with my noble friend Lord Marks. It was interesting to read that victims of that offence do not have a right to anonymity whereas this offence will be a sexual offence and therefore victims will have an automatic right to anonymity. It is somewhat difficult for some of us who are not lawyers to understand quite why two offences which appear to be very similar in perpetration and effect should be treated so differently. Revenge pornography was made an offence in 2014 and about 500 cases a year are successfully prosecuted but hundreds more are not. I am sure the Minister will explain to us why that is not a sexual offence but upskirting will, under the Bill before us, be a sexual offence. Given the difference, I hope that over the coming years the Government will pay close attention to the rates of charges and successful prosecutions which are brought under the different pieces of legislation to see whether there is evidence for anonymity for victims.

I too was interested in the words of Lisa Hallgarten, the head of policy and public affairs at Brook. A lot of what she had to say was about the way young people are unsure about their right to privacy and about what invasion of privacy is and the implications of that not only for prosecutions under the Bill but for schools when handling instances that may happen. Teaching young women what their rights to privacy are and young men what constitutes an invasion of privacy is important.

This Bill comes to us today when the Women and Equalities Committee has produced its report on sexual harassment. It said:

“Laws alone cannot address the cultural acceptability of sexual harassment, most of which is unreported, but they have an important part to play, including in responding to new forms of public sexual harassment facilitated by technology. We welcome legislation on ‘upskirting’ and ‘revenge porn’, but at present, the Government is too often racing to catch up with these developments”.


I congratulate the Government on taking one more step and I hope we will make this legislation get to the statute book with some alacrity so that fewer women are victims of this horrible crime.