Online Safety: Children and Young People

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered online safety for children and young people.

Just give me one second to get my notes in order, Mr Dowd.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lola McEvoy]

I will!

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

The hon. Lady has called a debate on a really important issue. Could she set out why she thinks that now is a really important time to discuss this vital topic?

[Lola McEvoy]

I will—and I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. It is my great honour to open this debate on online safety for our children. I welcome the Minister answering for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), answering for the official Opposition. I tabled this as my first debate in Westminster Hall, because I believe this issue is one of the most defining of our time. I promised parents and children in my constituency of Darlington that I would tackle it head-on, so here I am to fulfil that promise.

I would like to put on the record that I have long been inspired by the strength of the parents of Bereaved Families for Online Safety—a group of parents united by the unbearable loss of their children and by their steadfast commitment to get stronger online protections to prevent more children’s deaths. I say to Ellen, who is here with us this afternoon: thank you for your courage—you have experienced unimaginable pain, and I will do everything I can to prevent more parents from going through the same.

The consensus for action on this issue has been built, in no small part due to the incredible drive of parents to campaign for justice. It is felt in every corner of the country, and it is our job as a Government to step in and protect our children from online harm. In my constituency of Darlington, at door after door right across the town and regardless of background, income or voting intention, parents agreed with me that it is time to act to protect our children. I am taking this issue to the Government to fight for them.

I am standing up to amplify the voice of the girl who sends a picture of herself that she thought was private but arrives at school to find that it has been shared with all her peers; she is not only mortified but blamed, and the message cannot be unsent. I am standing up to amplify the voice of the boy who gets bombarded with violent, disturbing images that he does not want to see and never asked for, and who cannot sleep for thinking about them. I am standing up for the mother whose son comes home bruised and will not tell her what has happened, but who gets sent a video of him being beaten up and finds out that it was organised online. I am standing up for the father whose daughter refuses to eat anything because she has seen video after video after video criticising girls who look like her. I say to all those who have raised the alarm, to all the children who know something is wrong but do not know what to do, and to all those who have seen content that makes them feel bad about themselves, have been bullied online, have seen images they did not want to see or have been approached by strangers: we are standing up for you.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

I start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), who made really powerful and impactful comments, as have all those who have spoken today. I join her tribute to the bereaved families who have done such incredible work to campaign on this vital issue. I should, before anything else, direct everybody to the work of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who was the architect—the genesis—behind the Online Safety Act. I was one of the many Ministers who took over that baton for a couple of years and pulled the Act together.

As the hon. Member for Darlington said, only when we meet families who have been deeply impacted by online dangers and online harms does the impact of this really land with us. For me, meeting Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 as a result of the content that she had seen online, underlined how incredibly disastrous for young and vulnerable people the harms of the internet can be.

As the hon. Lady said, it is not just about the sites that are hosting inappropriate content; it is about the algorithms that take someone’s fears and anxieties and put them into an echo chamber where they are normalised and reinforced, which is the most dangerous part of this. Unfortunately, it is the algorithms that social media companies prize above everything else; they are the most jealously guarded parts of their organisations. Molly was one example resulting from that, but there are so many other examples of suicide, self-harm, anxiety, eating disorders and body image issues that come out of that world.

A year on from the Online Safety Act, it is interesting to see how it is fully implemented, particularly against the backdrop of the speed at which technology is evolving. It is frightening because, virtually every week in our constituencies, we see examples of the harms that are out there. In my constituency, just in the last couple of weeks, junior-age children were using the online world to bully and harass each other. That is something that used to stay within the school gates. Bullying still happened—I am so elderly, and it happened when I was at school—but it was something that was left behind at the school gates; it did not follow you home. Also, 27% of children have seen pornography by the age of 11, which brings a very toxic view of sex and relationships.

The Online Safety Act will hopefully encourage providers to do what they say they are doing when it comes to protecting children online, but the Minister has a huge responsibility to make sure that that happens, and to hold not just them but Ofcom to account to make sure that it is robustly implementing the guidelines that it is setting up. There are some amazing champions of that—Baroness Kidron has made incredible strides in the other place—but we need to make sure that Ofcom has not only the powers but the capacity. It has a huge amount under its jurisdiction and there is a huge amount of pressure. I know that the Minister will work very hard to ensure that it is held to account and equipped with what it needs.