Online Abuse
Debate between Kit Malthouse and Ruth Cadbury
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
My apologies, Mr Deputy Speaker, for stepping out of the Chamber, but I was involved in a school visit. I thank the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) for securing this very important debate. I also thank all those Members who have spoken before me and whom I have been able to hear.
Technology is a central part of our lives today; it is a tool. Sadly, used maliciously, it can be turned into a weapon that can have, and indeed has had, damaging and sometimes devastating consequences for victims. As others have mentioned, Members of this House have been victims of such abuse, and some have been sufficiently frightened by the abuse that they have been afraid to go home at the weekend. Most victims do not have the benefit of the police and parliamentary support that we have here. Like all bullying, bullies tend to target people who already feel vulnerable. Members have rightly acknowledged the gaps and the need for action, legislation, police and prosecutors, and, most importantly, awareness.
I want to focus my contribution on online abuse and harassment in schools and the importance of effective and consistent school management and curriculum policies to complement the effective legislation that we also need. I am honoured to be on the Women and Equalities Committee under the chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Basingstoke. We have been addressing the issue of sexual harassment and violence in schools. Our report is not quite ready, but I am sure that my Chair will not mind if I give a little flavour of what we have experienced. We were shocked by the extent that sexual imagery, abusive sexual relationships and objectification of women have been normalised by young people. We had two sessions—one with young men and the other with young women—in which we were told about the experiences of young people of the use and misuse of technology in and around the school environment. If we do not understand and address that misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and all the other kinds of abuse, we risk turning victims into criminals, which means that they will not get the support that they so badly need.
I wish to focus my remarks on the experience brought to me by one of my constituents, a headteacher at a successful and thriving secondary school. Recent safeguarding investigations introduced him to the shocking mobile and cyber-world in which virtually every child in his school and, he presumes, in other local schools and therefore nationally seem to be engaged for unfeasibly large proportions of their days and nights. What happened in his school started with the exchange of photos between two students who were in a consensual relationship, but it escalated. The images got out. There was blackmail and violence, and the police were involved. Criminal charges were considered. What started as a consensual relationship ended up as truly violent abuse, and it could have been prevented.
The situation raised some really important aspects of child online and mobile safety and the equalities agenda, which appear to be being ignored. The headteacher is seeking a body of work in some key areas that has cross-party and organisational support that can help schools and parents to safeguard children much more effectively.
It is right to focus on strengthening the law, but we need to look at a parallel solution if we are not to put thousands of teenagers at risk of criminal charges when education and child protection are more in order. Although tackling offenders and strengthening the law are very important, they are only a small part of what needs to be done and are not on their own a real solution. If we do not want young people to be needlessly and unfairly criminalised, elements of the law and the context of the online abuse must be thoroughly analysed before changes are made. We must focus not so much on reaction, but on prevention. The law is not always the correct tool, and it must not be used when young people are engaging in unwise activities—as so many do—which relate to the expectation and culture of a mobile and cyber environment in which appropriate adults have virtually no presence and where, too often, we leave them abandoned and to fend for themselves.
My constituent contends that a strong positive culture must dominate any community, including the online and mobile community, because when it is absent, there will never be a vacuum—a “street culture” will fill the void. Alas, he fears and he sees that this is the case with the mobile and cyber-worlds that our children spend so much of their day and night lives inhabiting. We need to take care not to end up targeting and criminalising young people who are, in fact, victims. This will require significant training and support for the police, as other Members have mentioned, and for others whose response to such crime already appears to be under-confident and very variable.
My constituent subscribes to a restorative justice approach in his school, and that might be appropriate in cases where mitigating factors are considered. He asserts that the ignored fact is that the vast majority of young people are already mobile and online victims in a largely unsupervised cyber-world. Although the internet gets considerable attention from safeguarding organisations and in training, mobile activity and mobile-based abuse are, in fact, even more rife but more neglected by us adults. Parents, teachers and other adults normally responsible for the routine safety of children are best placed to supervise and guide young people, yet they are largely absent from the potentially dangerous environment and too little is being done to address that omission.
There is an over-focus on the internet and the wrong applications, such as Facebook, because they are what we older people use and are familiar with. The mobile world and the dark web get less attention, yet they are part of most children’s experiences—perhaps the dark web to a lesser degree. There are lots of apps. I know Snapchat, but I do not use it. Hon. Members have probably never even heard of other apps unless we have asked our kids to tell us, and that does not always happen. The mobile and online culture in which our children live and grow up—the ground is established in the primary years for some of them but in early secondary for many more—is their normality.
This normalisation, with no appropriate adult presence to challenge it, is what leads to the lack of reporting of sexual and other mobile, online and cyber-abuse. We must deal with the issue that young people do not want to go to court, or they do not want perpetrators to be punished. The idea that abuse is not worth reporting is not necessarily an indictment of the criminal justice system, but it may not be considered worth reporting when it is seen as normalised.
Data from police forces and court proceedings are only a small subset of the true or possible dataset. The reality is that the relative lack of adult presence in the mobile and cyber-worlds of children, including the practitioners responsible for keeping children safe, means that conclusions drawn on available quantitative data must be received cautiously. We need to establish a different online, mobile and cyber-culture and skill-up children, parents and other adults.
Police, children’s services, health and education staff need consistent training on child exploitation and on how to support victims. In short, parents and other responsible adults just do not know how to be part of the mobile and cyber-world. Schools have a responsibility in this debate and in the remedies. Some suggestions that come from the work that our headteachers have done include every school having an equalities and safeguarding committee and updating the behaviour policy to have a strong safeguarding structure and training for parents, staff and, of course, students. Students should be engaged in this work and in policy development and roll out in an equal ratio to adults.
Heads suggest using up-to-date information and communications technology and security in the school ICT environment; ensuring staff, students and parents are clear on the law and people’s rights; and encouraging a transparent culture where children welcome parents and school staff interrogating their mobile devices as a matter of course. That is a challenge for parents, but we need to think about that in the context of an overall policy.
Heads also suggest developing clear, consistent procedures and guidance for investigating safeguarding, social media, sexual exploitation and mobile and online incidents, including the protection of staff investigating such incidents, while taking account of pupil privacy and so on; working with relevant organisations such as the police, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and others; and using pupil ICT champions to keep schools up to date with developments in social media and portable apps and to help inform e-safety curriculum developments.
Kit Malthouse
The hon. Lady refers to the difficulty with teenagers. Does she agree that we should perhaps look as a House at whether parents should have a legal duty to be aware of what their children are doing online, in the same way as we have legal duties to ensure that our children are not exposed to other dangers?
Ruth Cadbury
The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting issue. As a parent of two young adults, I have always wondered why all sorts of people are required to do all sorts of things in respect of the children in their care, yet there seems to be no legal duty that a woman signs when she pops out a baby. I am sure that people far more legally qualified than I am can respond in detail to the hon. Gentleman’s interesting and pertinent question.
I have concluded my core points. We need to address online bullying and abuse with a whole raft of mixed approaches that include not only enforcement, criminal charges and policing but public policy and education policy solutions, so that victims are not criminalised.