Online Safety Bill

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 97 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. We must strengthen the Bill by imposing an obligation on Ofcom to develop and issue a code of practice on violence against women and girls. This will empower Ofcom and guide services in meeting their duties in regard to women and girls, and encourage them to recognise the many manifestations of online violence that disproportionately affect women and girls.

Refuge, the domestic abuse charity, has seen a growing number of cases of technology-facilitated domestic abuse in recent years. As other noble Lords have said, this tech abuse can take many forms but social media is a particularly powerful weapon for perpetrators, with one in three women experiencing online abuse, rising to almost two in three among young women. Yet the tech companies have been too slow to respond. Many survivors are left waiting weeks or months for a response when they report abusive content, if indeed they receive one at all. It appears that too many services do not understand the risks and nature of VAWG. They do not take complaints seriously and they think that this abuse does not breach community standards. A new code would address this with recommended measures and best practice on the appropriate prevention of and response to violence against women and girls. It would also support the delivery of existing duties set out in the Bill, such as those on illegal content, user empowerment and child safety.

I hope the Minister can accept this amendment, as it would be in keeping with other government policies, such as in the strategic policing requirement, which requires police forces to treat violence against women and girls as a national threat. Adding this code would help to meet the Government’s national and international commitments to tackling online VAWG, such as the tackling VAWG strategy and the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse.

The Online Safety Bill is a chance to act on tackling the completely unacceptable levels of abuse of women and girls by making it clear through Ofcom that companies need to take this matter seriously and make systemic changes to the design and operation of their services to address VAWG. It would allow Ofcom to add this as a priority, as mandated in the Bill, rather than leave it as an optional extra to be tackled at a later date. The work to produce this code has already been done thanks to Refuge and other charities and academics who have produced a model that is freely available and has been shared with Ofcom. So it is not an extra burden and does not need to delay the implementation of the Bill; in fact, it will greatly aid Ofcom.

The Government are to be congratulated on their amendment to include controlling or coercive behaviour in their list of priority offences. I would like to congratulate them further if they can accept this valuable Amendment 97.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I start by commending my noble friend Lady Morgan on her clear introduction to this group of amendments. I also commend the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on her powerful speech.

From those who have spoken so far, we have a clear picture of the widespread nature of some of the abuse and offences that women experience when they go online. I note from what my noble friend Lady Morgan said that there is widespread support from a range of organisations outside the Committee for this group of amendments. She also made an important and powerful point about the potential chilling effect of this kind of activity on women, including women in public life, being able to exercise their right to freedom of expression.

I feel it is important for me to make it clear that—this is an obvious thing—I very much support tough legal and criminal sanctions against any perpetrator of violence or sexual abuse against women. I really do understand and support this, and hear the scale of the problem that is being outlined in this group of amendments.

Mine is a dissenting voice, in that I am not persuaded by the proposed solution to the problem that has been described. I will not take up a lot of the Committee’s time, but any noble Lords who were in the House when we were discussing a group of amendments on another piece of legislation earlier this year may remember that I spoke against making misogyny a hate crime. The reason why I did that then is similar, in that I feel somewhat nervous about introducing a code of conduct which is directly relevant to women. I do not like the idea of trying to address some of these serious problems by separating women from men. Although I know it is not the intention of a code such as this or any such measures, I feel that it perpetuates a sense of division between men and women. I just do not like the idea that we live in a society where we try to address problems by isolating or categorising ourselves into different groups of people, emphasising the sense of weakness and being victims of any kind of attack or offence from another group, and assuming that everybody who is in the other group will be a perpetrator of some kind of attack, criticism or violence against us.

My view is that, in a world where we see some of this serious activity happening, we should do more to support young men and boys to understand the proper expectations of them. When we get to the groups of amendments on pornography and what more we can do to prevent children’s access to it, I will be much more sympathetic. Forgive me if this sounds like motherhood and apple pie, but I want us to try to generate a society where basic standards of behaviour and social norms are shared between men and women, young and old. I lament how so much of this has broken down, and a lot of the problems we see in society are the fault of political and—dare I say it?—religious leaders not doing more to promote some of those social norms in the past. As I said, I do not want us to respond to the situation we are in by perpetuating more divisions.

I look forward to hearing what my noble friend the Minister has to say, but I am nervous about the solution proposed in the amendments.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, not least because she became a dissenting voice, and I was dreading that I might be the only one.

First, I think it important that we establish that those of us who have spent decades fighting violence against women and girls are not complacent about it. The question is whether the physical violence we describe in the Bill is the same as the abuse being described in the amendments. I worry about conflating online incivility, abuse and vile things said with physical violence, as is sometimes done.

I note that Refuge, an organisation I have a great deal of respect for, suggested that the user empowerment duties that opted to place the burden on women users to filter out their own online experience was the same as asking women to take control of their own safety and protect themselves offline from violence. I thought that was unfair, because user empowerment duties and deciding what you filter out can be women using their agency.