Child Abuse

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

It is for the police to deal with the apprehension of offenders and to act on information that they have available. It is not the purpose of the inquiry to deal with individual cases. It will be important to make sure that the inquiry separates the police operations from its own investigations and does not, in the process of making its findings known, jeopardise police officers or the proper administration of justice.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome all the Government are doing to bring the perpetrators of child abuse to justice, but will they do more to prevent it happening in the first place? Hundreds of thousands of people go online and access child pornography on the internet. Some people seem to take the view that, if that is all they do, it does not matter too much. But, of course, every such image of a child on the internet is a child who has been abused, and the people accessing those images are complicit in that crime. There is some overlap between those who access child pornography on the internet and those who go out to contact children and abuse them physically. There is a great deal of controversy over how big that overlap is. Will the Government do more research to look into the overlap between accessing child pornography on the internet and physically abusing children? Will they do more to support those charities that do wonderful work with people who accept their inappropriate urges and want not to offend physically? Organisations such as the Lucy Faithfull Foundation struggle for resources to do this very important work to prevent children being abused in the first place.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I could not agree more with the premise of my noble friend’s questions; it is important to support charities. I also agree that viewing images of children online is not a harmless pursuit. It is damaging to those who have been involved in sexual abuse to provide those images, but it also leads individuals on to sexual abuse. That is why we are right to take this view. We have open minds about how the Government should deal with this over time, but I agree with my noble friend that the numbers coming forward suggest that this problem has been made worse by people’s ability to view these images online.