Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill (Second sitting)

Gillian Keegan Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th July 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Liz Saville Roberts]

Q We are, as a Committee, concerned about overly criminalising children, but none the less would you feel that that same fear is there for adults as well?

Lisa Hallgarten: That may well be true. With any law, you want to ensure that it is not counterproductive. If people are less likely to point their finger at a perpetrator or to report an incident because they think it is inappropriate for the person who did it to be potentially imprisoned, that is something I suppose you would want to take into account in creating law. Young people especially do not want to criminalise their peers. They do want this to be taken seriously, but that is not necessarily the same thing.

[Gillian Keegan (Chichester) (Con)]

Q Thank you so much for coming. We have been hearing a lot about how one of the powers of this Bill is the prevention side through education, and it is helpful to have that laid out with your expertise. One of the things on which different witnesses have given us different information is how to get that balance right, while protecting children and victims, between a school child who has just made a bad judgment and has maybe not been educated correctly versus somebody who is a serial criminal. The police have described how they and the Crown Prosecution Service take each case on the merits to some degree, but do you think we get the balance right in this Bill? It is incredibly difficult to do that, and we have had people who say, “Well, it is the same to the victim.” Do you think we are getting the balance right here?

Lisa Hallgarten: I wonder whether it is the same to a victim, actually. Every incident is very particular. Some women would think, “That person is pathetic and sad,” and other people would feel really invaded and offended and harassed by the experience. For each woman it will be different. There is no perfect law that will address every victim’s experience of this.

I do not have the Bill in front of me, I am sorry to say, but I did not see anything about a prosecution being in the public interest. I know that in terms of sharing sexual images and the guidance to police on whether to prosecute, there is something about whether prosecution is in the public interest. For a lot of young people, it would not be in the public interest. It would be in the public interest to teach children not to behave that way in the first place. I am not sure whether the Bill is the place to address that, but certainly it needs to be addressed. Prosecution should not be automatic and it should be taken into account that a young person’s life could be ruined for something that was genuinely a spontaneous moment of stupidity. We would not want that to happen.

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

Q You mentioned that young women need greater understanding of consent and boundaries—that legislation may also send a signal or a message to them about what is not acceptable—but also that young people may be hesitant in reporting if they feel they will be caught up in the criminal justice system. That is quite a difficult balance to strike. I understand your point about education being critical, but if legislation is sending a message and young women need greater understanding on consent and boundaries, is this legislation drawn too narrowly? Should we be looking to broaden it out—for instance, to taking photographs down a woman’s blouse, and so on—on the grounds of sending the right message to reinforce the education? Are we too narrow in our scope?

Lisa Hallgarten: It is an interesting question whether law in itself is about education. I think people are glad that people are discussing this and taking it seriously, but I personally do not think having the law in and of itself is educational.