UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Digital Impact

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lady Kidron on securing this vital debate.

Noble Lords will be aware that I am the sponsor of the Online Safety Bill, which had its First Reading in your Lordships’ House on 11 June and is currently awaiting a date for Second Reading. I hope that the usual channels are listening. I readily admit that on the majority of occasions on which I have spoken about this issue, I have focused on trying to address concerns about online safety, so I welcome the opportunity today at least to begin my comments by focusing on the positives of the internet. After then moving on to the dangers, I would also like to set out some principles that I believe should inform how we debate online safety before finally homing in on some specific challenges relating to the live streaming of R18 material and posing questions to the Minister.

On the positives, the truth is that in many ways the internet greatly benefits the lives of children. As I look at this subject, mindful of the reference to the UN convention, it seems to me that many aspects of the convention are relevant, but I particularly pick out Article 17, with its stress on children’s access to information, in relation to which the internet clearly has an absolutely key role to play.

Research undertaken by the E-Learning Foundation has shown that children who access the internet at home are likely to receive higher marks at school than their counterparts. This is because they are able to take advantage of educational tools available online that enhance their educational experience. Such tools include the International Children’s Digital Library, which gives children free access to literature as well as access to free and fee-based games for younger children. These tools clearly show how the internet can have a positive role in children’s intellectual development.

Social media sites can also play a positive role. Research from the American Academy of Pediatrics has shown that social media can have the positive effect of enhancing the communication, social and technical skills of children. The same research also notes that these skills are transferable and can be applied just as well offline as online. This gives children greater ability to communicate positively and interact with the world around them in a way that they may not have been able to before.

The latest data from the Office for National Statistics report that 96% of households with children have an internet connection. However, that still means that some children are unable to reach the rich world of the internet. Of the households that are not connected to the internet—I recognise that not all of these have children within them—32% said that they lacked the necessary skills, 12% said that equipment costs were a barrier and 11% said that access costs were a barrier. We should remember that a small minority of children will find themselves disadvantaged without this access.

It is precisely because I passionately believe that children should go online to access all the positive educational and recreational opportunities that it affords that I am equally passionate that they should be able to do so in safety. On the question of safety—the negatives and dangers, if you like—I immediately think of a tragic case I mentioned in a speech just a couple of weeks ago of a 14 year-old boy acting out pornographic content he had seen online on a 10 year-old girl. Judge Robin Onions said the boy,

“used, abused then abandoned his victim”,

after repeatedly watching internet porn on his home computer that,

“treats women as objects and not people”.

Crucially, it was reported that the mother of the boy in question was unaware that he had visited such sites from his bedroom in their Shropshire home.

I also think of the report by the Authority for Television on Demand, For Adults Only?, which demonstrated that children as young as six are accessing hardcore pornography and that at least 44,000 primary schoolchildren accessed an adult website in one month alone. This raises a very important question for all parents: what are your children actually watching online via their home or mobile devices? The mother of the Shropshire boy had no idea he was watching the porn that inspired him to rape a 10 year-old. The fact that the Ofcom Report on Internet Safety Measures, published in July, demonstrates that, since 2013, there has been a 10% decrease in children aged five to 15 going online while a parent is in the room with them is of real concern. Of course, it is not always possible for parents to be present, especially when mobile devices are being used, which is why default filtering is an important policy tool to have in the mix. In reflecting on the UN convention, I again find myself thinking of Article 17 because, as well as emphasising the importance of access to information, it also says that states parties shall:

“Encourage the development of appropriate guidelines for the protection of the child from information and material injurious to his or her well-being”.

In debating the whole question of online safety, when we come to discuss how best to respond to the safety challenges—and respond we must—I get very concerned that the debate is muddled and confused by a tendency for those expounding a particular solution immediately to be attacked as naive by others who come along and expound another solution. What seems to happen is that someone talks about the importance of, for example, default adult content filters, in response to which someone else will stand up and say, “You are very naive. That isn’t the answer. The answer is education”. I believe that this is profoundly unhelpful. I do not believe that there is always “the answer” to public policy challenges. Almost always there is a mix of different policy solutions that together will generate the best possible outcome, at least for the present. My Online Safety Bill very much reflects this approach with its two central pillars of education and default adult content filters provided by internet service providers and mobile phone operators and, on top of this, additional age verification checks actually at the doors of websites specialising in R18-rated and 18-rated video on demand content from within the UK and, crucially, beyond.

I passionately believe in the importance of all these elements. Education can help children to deal with online behavioural challenges and to avoid content they would rather not encounter. Default adult content filters, meanwhile, provide additional protections to help children not stumble across unwanted adult content. They also provide a mechanism to protect children from damaging adult content that they should not see but might want to.

Mindful of the tragic Shropshire case I mentioned earlier, and thinking particularly of the duty to protect children articulated in Article 17 of the UN convention, I turn to the policy on access controls to R18-rated and 18-rated video on demand. The fact that children can easily access R18 material is absolutely shocking and a terrible indictment on our society. When people consider the story of the boy who watched hardcore porn and then went and acted out what he had seen on a 10 year-old girl, the initial instinct is to feel huge concern for the girl and anger with the boy, but I would suggest that, while he must take responsibility for his actions, there is a sense in which he is a victim as well. Why is it that the society he lives in has not seen fit to change the law to protect him? Are we not as legislators also responsible? If my Online Safety Bill had been law, that boy would not have been able to access this material because it would have been behind robust statutory age verification. Mindful of this, I very much welcome the Government’s commitment to introduce access controls.

In their 2013 report, Connectivity, Content and Consumers, the Government said on page 35 that they would legislate to,

“ensure that material that would be rated R18”—

by the BBFC—

“is put behind access controls … and ban outright content on regulated services that is illegal even in licensed sex shops”.

In March 2014, ATVOD’s report, For Adults Only?, urged the Government to implement these recommendations to,

“remove any doubt that material that would be rated R18”

must be behind access controls. Also in March 2014, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee reported on online safety. It welcomed the Government’s intention to legislate for R18 videos as promised in 2013, arguing that there,

“needed to be greater clarity over the legality of providing unrestricted access to hardcore pornography”.

Then, on 20 April, the Sunday Times stated that the Government had said that they would implement this by the end of the year.

In this regard, I have three questions for the Minister. Firstly, can he please provide us with an update on this legislation? I am aware that it may have been laid before Parliament in the form of regulations which I have missed. Secondly, can he explain why the Government’s commitment relates only to R18 material and not 18-rated material? If we have decided that it is not appropriate to sell a child 18-rated material offline and we have the technology to protect children from accessing R18 material offline, why do we not also protect them from 18-rated material? Surely this double standard is completely unacceptable.

Finally, I draw the Minister’s attention to the fact that the vast majority of live streamed R18 material is live streamed from sites outside the UK. Can he clarify that the legislation will deal with R18 and, I hope, 18-rated video material, live streamed from sites beyond the UK? If it does not, the Shropshire lad to whom I referred earlier is likely not to have been protected by such provision, because statistically it is more likely that he was accessing R18 material live streamed from beyond the UK than from within the UK.