Online Safety Bill

Dean Russell Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 5th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

A number of Members across the House have been pushing for Zach’s law, and I am really delighted that Zach’s family can see in Hansard that that campaigning has really made a direct change to the law.

[Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)]

I just want to echo the previous points. This has been a hard-fought decision, and I am so proud that the Government have done this, but may I echo the thanks to Zach for being a true hero? We talk about David and Goliath, the giant—the beast—who was taken down, but Zach has beaten the tech giants, and I think this is an incredible success.

[Paul Scully]

I absolutely echo my hon. Friend’s remarks, and I again thank him for his work.

We are also taking steps to strengthen Ofcom’s enforcement powers, which is why we are giving Ofcom a discretionary power to require non-compliant services to publish or notify their users of enforcement action that it has taken against the service. Ofcom will be able to use this power to direct a service to publish details or notify its UK users about enforcement notices it receives from Ofcom. I thank the Antisemitism Policy Trust for bringing this proposal to our attention and for its helpful engagement on the issue. This new power will promote transparency by increasing awareness among users about breaches of the duty in the Bill. It will help users make much more informed decisions about the services they use, and act as an additional deterrent factor for service providers.

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[Damian Collins]

The hon. Member makes an important point. Baroness Kidron’s amendment has been referred to; I anticipate that future amendments in the House of Lords will also seek to address the issue, which our Joint Committee looked at carefully in our pre-legislative scrutiny.

It should be much easier than it has been for the Russell family and the coroner to gain access to such important information. However, depending on the nature of the case, there may well be times when it would be wrong for families to have access. I think there has to be an expedited and official process through which the information can be sought, rather than a general provision, because some cases are complicated. There should not be a general right in law, but it needs to be a lot easier than it is. Companies should make the information available much more readily than they have done. The Molly Russell inquest had to be delayed for four months because of the late release of thousands of pages of information from Meta to the coroner. That is clearly not acceptable either.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) has tabled an amendment relating to small and risky platforms. The categorisation of platforms on the basis of size was linked to duties under the “legal but harmful” provisions, which we expect now to change. The priority illegal harms apply to platforms of all sizes. Surely when illegal activity is taking place on any platform of any size—I hope that the Minister will clarify this later—Ofcom must have the right to intervene and start asking questions. I think that, in practice, that is how we should expect the system to work.

Like other Members who served on the Joint Committee —I am thinking particularly of my hon. Friends the Members for Watford (Dean Russell) and for Stourbridge (Suzanne Webb), both of whom spoke so passionately about this subject, and the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) raised it as well—I was delighted to see that the Government had tabled amendments to cover Zach’s law. The fact that someone can deliberately seek out a person with epilepsy and target that person with flashing images with the intention of causing a seizure is a terrible example of the way in which systems can be abused. It is wrong for the platforms to be neutral and have no obligation to identify and stop that action, but the action is wrong in practice as well, and it demonstrates the need for us to ensure that the law keeps pace with the nature of new offences. I was very proud to meet Zach and his mother in October. I said to them then that their work had changed the law, and I am glad that the Government have tabled those amendments.

[Dean Russell]

May I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his chairmanship of the Joint Committee last year? We covered a wide range of challenging ethical, moral and technical decisions, with work across both Houses, and I think that the decisions contained in our report informed many of the Government amendments, but it was my hon. Friend’s chairmanship that helped to guide us through that period.

[Damian Collins]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what he has said, and for his significant work on the Committee.

There is a great deal that we could say about this Bill, but let me end by touching on an important topic that I think my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mrs Elphicke) will speak about later: the way in which social media platforms are used by people trafficking gangs to recruit those who can help them with bringing people into the country in small boats. It was right that the Government included immigration offences in the list of priority legal harms in schedule 7. It was also right that, following a recommendation from the Joint Committee, they included fraud and scam ads in the scope of the Bill.

We have already accepted, in principle, that advertising can be within the Bill’s scope in certain circumstances, and that priority legal harms can be written into the Bill and identified as such. As I understand it, my hon. Friend’s amendment seeks to bring advertising services—not just organic posts on social media platforms—into the Bill’s scope as well. I know that the Government want to consider illegal activity in advertising as part of the online advertising review, but I hope that this could be an expedited process running in parallel with the Bill as it completes its stages. Illegal activity in advertising would not be allowed in the offline world. Newspaper editors are legally liable for what appears in their papers, and broadcasters can lose their licence if they allow illegal content to feature in advertising. We do not yet have the same enforcement mechanism through the advertising industry with the big online platforms, such as Google and Facebook, where the bulk of display advertising now goes. Their advertising market is bigger than the television advertising market. We are seeing serious examples of illegal activity, and it cannot be right that while such examples cannot be posted on a Facebook page, if money is put behind them and they are run as advertisements they can.

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[John Penrose]

It is a pleasure to follow Zach’s MP, the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater). I particularly want to pick up on her final comments about the difficulties of platforms—not just small platforms, but larger ones—hosting extremist content, be it incels, the alt-right, the radical left or any other kind.

I will speak to my new clauses 34 and 35, which seek to deal with both disinformation and misinformation. They are important amendments, because although the Bill has taken huge steps forward—we are led to believe that it may take a couple more in due course when the revised version comes back if the recommittal is passed—there are still whole categories of harm that it does not yet address. In particular, it focuses, rightly and understandably, on individual harms to children and illegal activities as they relate to adults, but it does not yet deal with anything to do with collective harms to our society and our democracy, which matter too.

We have heard from former journalists in this debate. Journalists know it takes time and money to come up with a properly researched, authoritatively correct, accurate piece of journalism, but it takes a fraction of that time and cost to invent a lie. A lie will get halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on, as the saying rightly goes. Incidentally, the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said that it is wonderful that we are all learning so much. I share that sentiment; it is marvellous that we are all comparing and sharing our particular areas of expertise.

One person who seems to have all areas of expertise under his belt is my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), who chaired the Joint Committee. He rightly pointed out that this is a systems Bill, and it therefore deals with trying to prevent some things from happening—and yet it is completely silent on misinformation and disinformation, and their effect on us collectively, as a society and a democracy. New clauses 34 and 35 are an attempt to begin to address those collective harms alongside some individual harms we face. One of them deals with a duty of balance; the other deals with factual accuracy.

The duty of balance is an attempt to address the problem as it relates to filter bubbles, because this is a systems Bill and because each of us has a tailored filter bubble, by which each of the major platforms, and some of the minor ones, work out what we are interested in and feed us more of the same. That is fine for people who are interested in fishing tackle; that is super. But if someone is interested in incels and they get fed more and more incel stuff, or they are vaguely left wing and get taken down a rabbit hole into the increasingly radical left—or alternatively alt-right, religious extremism or whatever it may be—pretty soon they get into echo chambers, and from echo chambers they get into radicalisation, and from radicalisation they can pretty soon end up in some very murky, dark and deep waters.

There are existing rules for other old-world broadcasters; the BBC, ITV and all the other existing broadcasters have a duty of balance and undue prominence imposed on them by Ofcom. My argument is that we should consider ways to impose a similar duty of balance on the people who put together the programs that create our own individual filter bubbles, so that when someone is shown an awful lot of stuff about incels, or alt-right or radical left politics, somewhere in that filter bubble they will be sent something saying, “You do know that this is only part of the argument, don’t you? Do you know that there is another side to this? Here’s the alternative; here’s the balancing point.” We are not doing that at the moment, which is one of the reasons we have an increasingly divided societal and political debate, and that our public square as a society is becoming increasingly more fractious—and dangerous, in some cases. New clause 35 would fix that particular problem.

New clause 34 would deal with the other point—the fact that a lie will get halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on. It tries to deal with factual accuracy. Factual accuracy is not quite the same thing as truth. Truth is an altogether larger and more philosophical concept to get one’s head around. It is how we string together accurate and correct facts to create a narrative or an explanation. Factual accuracy is an essential building block for truth. We must at least try to ensure that we can all see when someone has made something up or invented something, whether it is that bleach is a good way to cure covid or whatever. When somebody makes something up, we need to know and it needs to be clear. In many cases that is clear, but in many cases, if it is a plausible lie, a deepfake or whatever it may be, it is not clear. We need to be able to see that easily, quickly and immediately, and say, “I can discount this, because I know that the person producing it is a serial liar and tells huge great big porkies, and I shouldn’t be trusting what they are sending me, or I can see that the actual item itself is clearly made up.”

The duty of achieving balance already exists in rules and law in other parts of our society and is tried and tested—it has stood us very well and done a good job for us for 40 or 50 years, since TV and radio became ubiquitous—and the same is true, although not for quite such a long time, for factual accuracy. There are increasingly good methods of checking the factual accuracy of individual bits of content, and if necessary, in some cases of doing so in real time, too. For example, Adobe is leading a very large global grouping producing something called the Content Authenticity Initiative, which can tell if something is a deepfake, because it has an audit trail of where the image, the item or whatever it may be came from and how it has been updated, modified or changed during the course of its life.

[Dean Russell]

On that point, I want to raise the work that my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans), who is not in the Chamber at the moment, has done on body image. When images are photo-shopped and changed to give an idea of beauty that is very different from what is possible in the real world, that very much falls into the idea of truth. What are my hon. Friend’s thoughts on that point?

[John Penrose]

Addressing that is absolutely essential. That goes for any of the deepfake examples we have heard about, including from my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller), because if we know that something has been changed—and the whole point about deepfake is that it is hard to tell—we can tell easily and say, “I know that is not right, I know that is not true, I know that is false, and I can aim away from it and treat it accordingly”.

Just to make sure that everybody understands, this is not some piece of new tech magic; it is already established. Adobe, as I have said, is doing it with the Content Authenticity Initiative, which is widely backed by other very serious tech firms. Others in the journalism world are doing the same thing, with the Journalism Trust Initiative. There is NewsGuard, which produces trust ratings; the Trust Project, which produces trust indicators; and we of course have our own press regulators in this country, the Independent Press Standards Organisation and IMPRESS.

I urge the Government and all here present not to be satisfied with where this Bill stands now. We have all heard how it can be improved. We have all heard that this is a new, groundbreaking and difficult area in which many other countries have not even got as far as we have, but we should not be in any way satisfied with where we are now. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) said earlier that we need to approach this Bill in a spirit of being humble, and this is an area in which humility is absolutely essential. I hope all of us realise how much further we have to go, and I hope the Minister will say how he proposes to address these important and so far uncovered issues in due course.

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[Jim Shannon]

The Minister might be of the same mind himself.

Through speaking in these debates, my office has seen an increase in correspondence from parents who are thankful that these difficult issues are being talked about. The world is changing and progressing, and if we are going to live in a world where we want to protect our children and our grandchildren—I have six grandchildren —and all other grandchildren who are involved in social media, the least we can do is make sure they are safe.

I commend the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) and others, including the hon. Member for Watford (Dean Russell), who have spoken about Zach’s law. We are all greatly impressed that we have that in the Bill through constructive lobbying. New clause 28, which the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) referred to, relates to advocacy for young people. That is an interesting idea, but I feel that advocacy should be for the parents first and not necessarily young people.

Ahead of the debate, I was in contact with the Royal College of Psychiatrists. It published a report entitled “Technology use and the mental health of children and young people”—new clause 16 is related to that—which was an overview of research into the use of screen time and social media by children and young teenagers. It has been concluded that excessive use of phones and social media by a young person is detrimental to their development and mental health—as we all know and as Members have spoken about—and furthermore that online abuse and bullying has become more prevalent because of that. The right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) referred to those who are susceptible to online harm. We meet them every day, and parents tell me that our concerns are real.

A recent report by NHS Digital found that one in eight 11 to 16-year-olds reported that they had been bullied online. When parents contact me, they say that bulling online is a key issue for them, and the statistics come from those who choose to be honest and talk about it. Although the Government’s role is to create a Bill that enables protection for our children, there is also an incredible role for schools, which can address bullying. My hon. Friend the Member for Upper Bann (Carla Lockhart) and I talked about some of the young people we know at school who have been bullied online. Schools have stepped in and stopped that, encouraging and protecting children, and they can play that role as well.

We have all read of the story of Molly Russell, who was only 14 years old when she took her life. Nobody in this House or outside it could not have been moved by her story. Her father stated that he strongly believed that the images, videos and information that she was able to access through Instagram played a crucial part in her life being cut short. The Bill must complete its passage and focus on strengthening protections online for children. Ultimately, the responsibility is on large social media companies to ensure that harmful information is removed, but the Bill puts the onus on us to hold social media firms to account and to ensure that they do so.

Harmful and dangerous content for children comes in many forms—namely, online abuse and exposure to self-harm and suicidal images. In addition, any inappropriate or sexual content has the potential to put children and young people at severe risk. The Bill is set to put provisions in place to protect victims in the sharing of nude or intimate photos. That is increasingly important for young people, who are potentially being groomed online and do not understand the full extent of what they are doing and the risks that come with that. Amendments have been tabled to ensure that, should such cases of photo sharing go to court, provisions are in place to ensure complete anonymity for the victims—for example, through video links in court, and so on.

I commend the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller), who is not in her place, for her hard work in bringing forward new clause 48. Northern Ireland, along with England and Wales, will benefit from new clause 53, and I welcome the ability to hand down sentences of between six months and potentially five years.

Almost a quarter of girls who have taken a naked image have had their image sent to someone else online without their permission. Girls face very distinct and increased risks on social media, with more than four in five online grooming crimes targeting girls, and 97% of child abuse material featuring the sexual abuse of girls—wow, we really need to do something to protect our children and to give parents hope. There needs to be increased emphasis and focus on making children’s use of the internet safer by design. Once established, all platforms and services need to have the capacity and capability to respond to emerging patterns of sexual abuse, which often stem from photo sharing.

The Minister referred to terrorism and how terrorism can be promoted online. I intervened on him to mention the glorification of IRA terrorism and how that encourages further acts of terrorism and people who are susceptible to be involved. I am quite encouraged by the Minister’s response, and I think that we need to take a significant step. Some in Northern Ireland, for instance, try to rewrite history and use the glorification of terrorism for that purpose. We would like to see strengthening of measures to ensure that those involved in those acts across Northern Ireland are controlled.

In conclusion, there are many aspects of the Bill that I can speak in support of in relation to the benefits of securing digital protections for those on social media. This is, of course, about protecting not just children, but all of us from the dangers of social media. I have chosen to speak on these issues as they are often raised by constituents. There are serious matters regarding the glorification and encouragement of self-harm that the Bill needs to address. We have heard stories tonight that are difficult to listen to, because they are true stories from people we know, and we have heard horror stories about intimate photo sharing online. I hope that action on those issues, along with the many others that the Government are addressing, will be embedded in the Bill with the intent to finally ensure that we have regulations and protection for all people, especially our children—I think of my children and grandchildren, and like everybody else, my constituents.

[Dean Russell]

I welcome the Minister to his place; I know that he will be excellent in this role, and it is incredible that he is so across the detail in such a short time.

I will primarily talk about new clause 53—that may not be that surprising, given how often it has been spoken about today—which is, ultimately, about Zach’s law. Zach is a truly heroic figure, as has been said. He is a young child with cerebral palsy, autism and epilepsy who was cruelly trolled by sick individuals who sent flashing images purposely to cause seizures and cause him damage. That was not unique to Zach, sadly; it happened to many people across the internet and social media. When somebody announced that they were looking for support, having been diagnosed with epilepsy, others would purposely identify that and target the person with flashing images to trigger seizures. That is absolutely despicable.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Suzanne Webb) has been my partner in crime—or in stopping the crime—over the past two years, and this has been a passion for us. Somebody said to me recently that we should perhaps do our victory lap in the Chamber today for the work that has been done to change the law, but Zach is the person who will get to go around and do that, as he did when he raised funds after he was first cruelly trolled.

My hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) also deserves an awful lot of praise. My hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge and I worked with him on the Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill this time last year. It was incredible to work with Members of both Houses to look at how we can make the Bill better. I am pleased about the response to so many measures that we put forward, including the fact that we felt that the phrase “legal but harmful” created too many grey areas that would not catch the people who were doing these awful—what I often consider to be—crimes online to cause harm.

I want to highlight some of what has been done over the past two years to get Zach’s law to this point. If I ever write a memoir, I am sure that my diaries will not be as controversial as some in the bookshops today, but I would like to dedicate a chapter to Zach’s law, because it has shown the power of one individual, Zach, to change things through the democratic process in this House, to change the law for the entire country and to protect people who are vulnerable.

Not only was Zach’s case raised in the Joint Committee’s discussions, but afterwards my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge and I managed to get all the tech companies together on Zoom—most people will probably not be aware of this—to look at making technical changes to stop flashing images being sent to people. There were lots of warm words: lots of effort was supposedly put in so that we would not need a law to stop flashing images. We had Giphy, Facebook, Google, Twitter—all these billion-pound platforms that can do anything they want, yet they could not stop flashing images being sent to vulnerable people. I am sorry, but that is not the work of people who really want to make a difference. That is people who want to put profit over pain—people who want to ensure that they look after themselves before they look after the most vulnerable.

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[Suzanne Webb]

Talking of Christmas, would not the best Christmas present for lovely Zach be to enshrine new clause 53, that amazing amendment, as Zach’s law? Somehow we should formalise it as Zach’s law—that would be a brilliant Christmas present.

[Dean Russell]

I wholeheartedly agree. Zach, if you are listening right now, you are an absolute hero—you have changed so much for so many people. Without your effort, this would not be happening today. In future, we can look back on this and say, “You know what? Democracy does work.”

I thank all hon. Members for their campaigning work to raise Zach’s law in the public consciousness. It even reached the US. I am sure many hon. Members dance along to Beyoncé of an evening or listen to her in the car when they are bopping home; a few months ago she changed one of her YouTube videos, which had flashing images in it, because the Epilepsy Society reached out to describe the dangers that it would cause. These campaigns work. They are about public awareness and about changing the law. We talk about the 15 minutes of shame that people face on social media, but ultimately the shame is on the platforms for forcing us to legislate to make them do the right thing.

I will end with one small point. The internet has evolved; the world wide web has evolved; social media is evolving; the metaverse, 3D virtual reality worlds and augmented reality are changing. I urge the Government or the House to look at creating a Committee specifically on the Bill. I know that there are lots of arguments that it should be a Sub-Committee of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, but the truth is that the online world is changing dramatically. We cannot take snapshots every six months, every year or every two years and assume that they will pick up on all the changes happening in the world.

As the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) said, TikTok did not even exist when the Bill was first discussed. We now have an opportunity to ask what is coming next, keep pace with it and put ethics and morality at the heart of the Bill to ensure that it is fit for purpose for many decades to come. I thank the Minister for his fantastic work; my partner in crime, my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge, for her incredible work; and all Members across the House. Please, please, let us get this through tonight.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

It is a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell) and so many hon. Members who have made thoughtful contributions. I will confine my comments to the intersection of new clauses 28 and 45 to 50 with the impact of online pornography on children in this country.

There has been no other time in the history of humanity when we have exposed children to the violent, abusive, sexually explicit material that they currently encounter online. In 2008, only 14% of children under 13 had seen pornography; three years later, that figure had risen to 49%, correlating with the rise in children owning smartphones. Online pornography has a uniquely pernicious impact on children. For very young children, there is an impact just from seeing the content. For older teenagers, there is an impact on their behaviour.

We are seeing more and more evidence of boys exhibiting sexually aggressive behaviour, with actions such as strangulation, which we have dealt with separately in this House, and misogynistic attitudes. Young girls are being conditioned into thinking that their value depends on being submissive or objectified. That is leading children down a pathway that leads to serious sexual offending by children against children. Overwhelmingly, the victims are young girls.

Hon. Members need not take my word for it: after Everyone’s Invited began documenting the nature and extent of the sexual experiences happening in our schools, an Ofsted review revealed that the most prevalent victims of serious sexual assaults among the under-25s are girls aged 15 to 17. In a recent publication in anticipation of the Bill, the Children’s Commissioner cited the example of a teenage boy arrested for his part in the gang rape of a 14-year old girl. In his witness statement to the police, the boy said that it felt just like a porn film.

Dr John Foubert, the former White House adviser on rape prevention, has said:

“It wasn’t until 10 years ago when I came to the realization that the secret ingredient in the recipe for rape was not secret at all…That ingredient…is today’s high speed Internet pornography.”

The same view has been expressed, in one form or another, by the chief medical officers for England and for Wales, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, the Government Equalities Office, the Children’s Commissioner, Ofsted and successive Ministers.

New clause 28 requests an advocacy body to represent and protect the interests of child users. I welcome the principle behind the new clause. I anticipate that the Minister will say that he is already halfway there by making the Children’s Commissioner a statutory consultee to Ofcom, along with the Domestic Abuse Commissioner and others who have been named in this debate. However, whatever the Government make of the Opposition’s new clause, they must surely agree that it alights on one important point: the online terrain in respect of child protection is evolving very fast.

By the time the Bill reaches the statute book, new providers will have popped up again. With them will come unforeseen problems. When the Bill was first introduced, TikTok did not exist, as my hon. Friend the Member for Watford said a moment ago, and neither did OnlyFans. That is precisely the kind of user-generated site that is likely to try and dodge its obligations to keep children safe from harm, partly because it probably does not even accept that it exposes them to harm: it relies on the fallacy that the user is in control, and operates an exploitative business model predicated on that false premise.

I think it important for someone to represent the issue of child protection on a regular basis because of the issue of age verification, which we have canvassed, quite lightly, during the debate. Members on both sides of the House have pointed out that the current system which allows children to self-certify their date of birth is hopelessly out of date. I know that Ministers envisage something much more ambitious with the Bill’s age assurance and age verification requirements, including facial recognition technology, but I think it is worth our having a constant voice reporting on the adequacy of whatever age assurance steps internet providers may take, because we know how skilful children can be in navigating the internet. We know that there are those who have the technological skills to IP shroud or to use VPN. I also think it important for there to be a voice to maintain the pressure on the Government—which is what I myself want to do tonight—for an official Government inquiry into pornography harms, akin to the one on gambling harms that was undertaken in 2019. That inquiry was extremely important in identifying all the harm that was caused by gambling. The conclusions of an equivalent inquiry into pornography would leave no wriggle room for user-generated services to deny the risk of harm.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) pointed out, very sensibly, that her new clauses 45 to 50 build on all the Law Commission’s recommendations. It elides with so much work that has already been done in the House. We have produced, for instance, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which dealt with revenge porn, whether threatened or actual and whether genuine or fake, and with coercive control. Many Members recognise what was achieved by all our work a couple of years ago. However, given the indication from Ministers that they are minded to accept the new clauses in one form or another, I should like them to explain to the House how they think the Bill will capture the issue of sexting, if, indeed, it will capture that issue at all.

As the Minister will know, sexting means the exchanging of intimate images by, typically, children, sometimes on a nominally consensual basis. Everything I have read about it seems to say, “Yes, prima facie this is an unlawful act, but no, we do not seek to criminalise children, because we recognise that they make errors of judgment.” However, while I agree that it may be proportionate not to criminalise children for doing this, it remains the case that when an image is sent with the nominal consent of the child—it is nearly always a girl—it is often a product of duress, the image is often circulated much more widely than the recipient, and that often has devastating personal consequences for the young girl involved. All the main internet providers now have technology that can identify a nude image. It would be possible to require them to prevent nude images from being shared when, because of extended age-verification abilities, they know that the user is a child. If the Government are indeed minded to accept new clauses 45 to 50, I should like them to address that specific issue of sexting rather than letting it fall by the wayside as something separate, or outside the ambit of the Bill.

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We have heard a great many tragic stories today about children who have been harmed through other people’s direct access to their lives over mobile phones, but, as my hon. Friend said, one of the overriding results of the internet is the sexualisation of children in a truly destructive way. As my hon. Friend also said, about 50% of 12-year-olds have now seen online pornography, and 1.4 million UK children access porn every month. There is nothing mainstream about this pornography. It is not the same as the dodgy magazines of old. Violence, degrading behaviour, abuse and addiction are all mainstream on pornography sites now.

[Dean Russell]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the work of charities such as Dignify in Watford, where Helen Roberts does incredible work in raising awareness of this issue, is essential to ensuring that people are aware of the harm that can be done?

[Miriam Cates]

I completely agree. Other charities, such as CEASE—the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation —and Barnardo’s have been mentioned in the debate, and I think it so important to raise awareness. There are many harms in the internet, but pornography is an epidemic. It makes up a third of the material on the internet, and its impact on children cannot be overstated. Many boys who watch porn say that it gives them ideas about the kind of sex that they want to try. It is not surprising that a third of child sexual abuse is committed by other children. During puberty—that very important period of development—boys in particular are subject to an erotic imprint. The kind of sex that they see and the sexual ideas that they have during that time determine what they see as normal behaviour for the rest of their lives. It is crucial for children to be protected from harmful pornography that encourages the objectification and abuse of—almost always—women.