Digital Exploitation of Women and Girls

Jas Athwal Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Jas Athwal (Ilford South) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Sir Mark Hendrick) for securing this hugely important debate.

At the start of the year, many of us were horrified by the ease and speed at which thousands of women and children had their bodily autonomy violated, simply for existing online, but we should not kid ourselves that this was a one-off or an isolated scandal. Digital abuse of women and girls is not an anomaly; it is systemic. Only a few weeks ago, it was reported that Meta’s smart glasses are being used to secretly film women without their consent. This is not accidental misuse; it is foreseeable harm. Before these technologies are embedded in the fabric of everyday life, we have a duty to regulate and legislate so that women and girls do not become the tragic cost of a tech revolution that prizes innovation over safety. We must be proactive, not reactive, because the ways in which women and girls are degraded and denied bodily autonomy online are constantly evolving.

We must enforce safety by design, and it must mean more than administrative box-ticking. Tech firms must be able to demonstrate that they have seriously considered the harms their products may cause, and that they have meaningfully mitigated those risks. There is so much more I could say on this, particularly in the case of Grok and Meta’s smart glasses. Even a moment’s serious reflection would have made it glaringly obvious that these technologies could be exploited. This failure has already cost thousands of women and girls their sense of safety and dignity online. We must take a firm and sustained approach, and fully empower Ofcom, so that this moment of technological progress does not become a major step backward for women’s safety.