Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill

Joani Reid Excerpts

Friday 7th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[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.