Caroline Dinenage
Main Page: Caroline Dinenage (Conservative - Gosport)Department Debates - View all Caroline Dinenage's debates with the Ministry of Justice
Tackling Image-based Abuse
Caroline Dinenage Excerpts(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I thank the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) for tabling such an important debate, and she made some really powerful points.
I declare an interest: being very elderly, at one stage I was the Minister for Women and Equalities, and I was responsible for bringing forward the Revenge Porn Helpline. When that legislation came through, I was hopeful that that vital resource would be something temporary, and that one day it would be abolished because we did not need it any more. In actual fact, quite the opposite is true: it is busier than ever. As the hon. Member for Bolton North East said, it is catching some terrible perpetrators of the most horrific online abuse.
I was also the Minister for Digital and Culture who held the baton for a couple of years on the Online Safety Act 2023. I hope that legislation will offer more protection for the victims of this humiliating crime, which, as we know, disproportionately affects women. But technology moves so fast. I am concerned that, despite the protections in the Act and the Revenge Porn Helpline, the emergence of deepfakes in particular has opened up a new front in the war on women—I say that because 99% of pornographic images and deepfakes are of women. Literally tens of millions of deepfake images are being produced every year, most of them sexual, as the hon. Member for Bolton North East said.
The fact that the use of nudification apps and the creation of ultra-realistic deepfake porn for private use is still legal, and worse, becoming more popular, is a war on women’s autonomy. It is a war on our dignity, and a war on our identity. The creation of these unpleasant sexual or nude deepfakes serves to push us out of those spaces and to undermine and silence us, both online and offline. We must do everything we can to stand against it.
I am sure the Minister agrees that we owe a debt to my noble Friend Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge for her work to legislate in this area. She encountered some hate of her own when she was appointed to the other place—she was too young and too female—but her very presence there indicates exactly why we need young women in both Houses to stand up against these injustices and bring them to the fore. I hope the Minister will do everything in her power to see my noble Friend’s fantastic Bill become law.