Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill

Jess Asato Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 7th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jess Asato (Lowestoft) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) for the huge amount of work that he has put into this legislation. I am proud to be a co-sponsor of the Bill, in support of his tireless efforts in this area, his leadership and his lifelong commitment to safeguarding children from harm.

Over the past six months, the Bill has been a lightning rod for the conversation about children’s access to smartphones and social media. The Bill does not mark the end of that conversation; rather, it marks the start of a national debate on what childhood in the online age should look like. I am glad that the Government have positively engaged with the Bill and that, through this legislation, we can now see a path towards ensuring that we give children the best possible, and crucially the least harmful, start in life.

Between 2017 and 2021, there was a 60% increase in the number of children with a probable mental health condition, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and body dysmorphia. The impact was particularly acute for young women, as many have mentioned. Screen time also has links to poor physical health outcomes, such as childhood obesity. I was particularly concerned to learn, in one of the hearings on my hon. Friend’s Bill, about data linking screen use to shortsightedness and worse eye health. A report from the College of Optometrists in 2023 found that cases of myopia among children aged five to 16 have risen by 12% over the last five years in the UK.

Heavy smartphone use also impacts sleep patterns and the ability to fall and stay asleep—as many of us will know. One study found that children are 79% less likely to get the recommended eight hours of sleep if they use their phones. That clearly has an effect on their attainment and life outcomes. Indeed, four in 10 teenagers admit that their smartphone is distracting them from schoolwork.

Clause 1 requires the UK chief medical officer to publish advice for parents and carers on the use of smart phones and social media by children, which we welcome. This is particularly key because the issue of young people’s smartphones and social media requires a public health focus, as has been argued. We know that almost all children have a smartphone by the age of 15 and that, as my hon. Friend said, it is vulnerable children who are spending significantly longer on their phones. It is our duty in this place to protect children, who are vulnerable, and the most vulnerable children.

For almost a quarter of children, smartphone use has become a behavioural addiction, and that is not accidental. Tech companies have created products without the input of child development experts, and we know this because they told us that they did not have any child development experts on their product boards when they came to a session organised by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington. These algorithms seek to get young people hooked before they can even properly comprehend it, and like a drug, they keep coming back for more.

Children have sadly lost a love of reading, with levels at their lowest in the UK among our children, and of the outdoors. As Jonathan Haidt argues in his book “The Anxious Generation”, childhood has ceased to be play-based and has become phone-based. This simultaneous over-protectiveness offline and under-protectiveness online has created a perfect storm for inhibiting children’s development. For example, we are witnessing a marked increase in referrals for delayed speech and language abilities. There are now pram adaptations for babies and toddlers to watch smartphones, rather than learning from the stimulus of the real world around them. I hope that the chief medical officer’s remit extends to working with early childhood and speech and language organisations to issue guidance for parents in the very early years.

The online world that we are sending our children out into is not a world we would send them out into in real life, and yet this is their real life. Children as young as seven are stumbling across and are currently freely able to access pornographic content online. The Children’s Commissioner found that one key area where children access pornography is, perhaps surprisingly, the social media platform X. Eight in 10 children have encountered violent pornography online by the age of 18, and that is having serious consequences, desensitising young boys and girls and warping their perceptions of healthy sex and relationships.

[John Grady (Glasgow East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. In this debate, we are focusing a lot on children, but the reality is that these scars will endure for the rest of their lives. This access to pornography will scar their relationships and their ability to form relationships for the rest of their lives, which is another reason why the Bill is so very important.

[Jess Asato]

I am incredibly grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. That is very true. We have seen a huge 40% increase in the use of strangulation of women in sexual relationships, and there is much to suggest that this is related to more and more young people watching strangulation in pornography online. That is another subject, but I would definitely like to see that go as well.

It is really important that the commencement of age verification in the Online Safety Act, which was introduced by the previous Government and supported by those on the Labour Front Bench at the time, must be upheld and to the most robust standards. I look forward to the Minister saying that that is exactly what the Government will do.

[Chris Bryant]

That is exactly what the Government will do.

[Jess Asato]

I am grateful to the Minister.

Social media is fuelling the rise of extremist misogyny online and normalising harassment and violence against women and girls in real life. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Rosie Wrighting) so bravely recounted in this place yesterday, we are not immune to that in this place. Some 90% of girls say they have been sent an explicit picture or video. The New Britain Project, More in Common and the National Education Union recently ran a focus group in my constituency with parents about their children’s access to smartphones. In the group, a mother spoke of how her daughter was so regularly sent dick pics that, by the age of 15, she was used to drawing a little sombrero on the picture, sending it back and blocking the sender. The mother said:

“No child that age should be seeing male penises. It is quite traumatic, isn’t it, for a kid to be witnessing that kind of thing? But it is everywhere.”

Children should not be forced to find a way to cope—with funny pictures—because something incessantly traumatises them. We would not accept our children being flashed in the streets, so why is it different online? Why do we not expect the tech companies to act? Their products allow this to happen to our children all day, every day, yet we still do not have any movement from them.

We know that the problem is only getting worse, particularly with the use of Al and the rise of nude deepfakes. Thankfully, the Government are now taking strong action on deepfakes, but I urge them to go further by considering age verification for app stores, so that our young people know that when they access app stores, the content is right for their age and level of development.

Online sexual crimes committed against children have risen by 400% since 2013. A generation is growing up chronically online, raised by the internet, and we cannot stand idly by in the name of freedom or freedom of speech. There is no freedom in addiction, in being harmed or in children being underdeveloped because they have not experienced socialisation, the great outdoors, the pleasure of books, or simply not being harmed by being sent horrible things that they should not have to see.

Children in the online world are taught to look up to role models with unhealthy opinions, unrealistic beauty standards and conspicuous wealth beyond their dreams. Children are being marketed to and sold to, all day, every day. When they cannot afford or look like what they see, they feel worthless. Children are cyber-bullied. They are exposed to content that encourages self-harm and competitive anorexia, and romanticises suicide. That has already caused untold harm for parents who have seen their children take their own lives after engaging with such material. Our children are becoming infected by an epidemic of loneliness.

At some point, we in this place have to say, “Enough is enough.” As a parent of young children, I know that parents cannot and should not be expected to do this alone; we need a decisive legal and cultural shift that reclaims childhood for the real world. Every month there is a “How to detox from social media” article about taking ourselves away from toxic social media—just like how to detox after Christmas. We read that content as adults, because we also struggle to stop looking at social media, so why do we expect our children to exercise self-control that we ourselves do not have?

The UK must follow countries such as Australia by raising the age of online consent from 13 to 16. Some 55% of Gen Z and 86% of parents in the UK support that idea, and 130,000 people recently signed a petition on the UK Parliament website to that effect. I also believe that we need to create a new watershed of social norms by banning smartphones at school. Too many of the headteachers I speak to who are doing the right thing by banning smartphones in their schools tell me that they get complaints from students and parents who see that other schools do things differently. It makes it harder for parents to enforce rules and norms in their own homes when they cannot point to principles that the whole country adheres to.

[Joani Reid (East Kilbride and Strathaven) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating Anas Sarwar, the leader of the Scottish Labour party, on announcing two weeks ago that he would ban mobile phones in schools across Scotland?

[Jess Asato]

Of course I join my hon. Friend in those remarks.

Parents and future generations will not forgive us if we do not act swiftly. In the Government’s assessment under clause 3, I hope that we will finally see a recognition that the status quo is not working for children or parents and that radical action is needed. Only then can we work to ensure that children can grow up and develop without trauma, without harm and without being addicted to being harmed and traumatised. This Bill gets us closer to that, and I am happy to support it.