Lord Bishop of Chester
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The Lord Bishop of Chester
That this House takes note of the impact of pornography on society.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, your Lordships may feel that they have sometimes listened to a speech from these Benches and thought that the speaker is not entirely familiar with the subject. There is, of course, an old adage that generally the Bishop speaks and generally the Bishop speaks generally. I shall avoid an echo of the confessional, but I can say that my first-hand knowledge of pornography is very limited. Of the range of vices available to me, I have been tempted by most, but not in any significant way by pornography. If the statistics are to be believed, that makes me a rather unusual, if not exotic, creature.
Pornography is a very widespread feature of western society, especially since the advent of the internet age. In my ministry I have come across addiction to pornography as a factor in individual marriage breakdown. As a Bishop, I have had two of my clergy prosecuted for downloading child sexual abuse images, usually called child pornography. Both these priests were given custodial sentences and both are unlikely ever again to exercise the Christian ministry for which they were trained.
As I understand it, the sheer volume of cases of downloading child pornography has overwhelmed the police to the point that prosecutions are no longer routinely brought. Will the Minister comment specifically on this point and let the House know if and why possession of child pornography is now taken less seriously by the criminal justice system?
Beyond this direct contact in my ministry with the consequences of pornography, I have been struck by a whole series of warnings that I have read about. Earlier this year the BBC reported a survey of 700 children aged 12 or 13. Some 20% said that they had already seen pornographic images that had shocked or upset them. More than 10% said that they had taken part in or had made a sexually explicit video. Half of those contacted were not yet teenagers. The director of Childline was reported as saying:
“Children of all ages today have easy access to a wide range of pornography. If we as a society shy away from talking about this issue, we are failing the thousands of young people it is affecting … they also tell Childline that watching porn is making them feel depressed, giving them body image issues, making them feel pressured to engage in sexual acts they’re not ready for”.
Also earlier this year the Times reported a study by the University of Bristol School for Policy Studies across a range of European countries, including the UK. It found that 40% of the children surveyed, this time between the ages of 13 and 17, had suffered sexual coercion of some sort ranging from rape to being pressurised into unwanted sexual activity, often with elements of physical violence. A television programme in the past week rather vividly brought out the situation reflected in that survey.
Last week the Prime Minister told the other place that he had negotiated an opt-out to protect the UK from the new net neutrality provisions for the European Union, which would make the current voluntary adult content filtering arrangements in the UK by the main internet service providers illegal. We should all be grateful to the Prime Minister for his commitment to keep children safe, but can the Minister confirm whether this will require legislation which, I assume, will take up the main provisions of the Online Safety Bill in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, which had its Second Reading in this House in July? I pay tribute to the noble Baroness for her persistence in raising these issues over the years. Will this protection extend to all ISP providers and not just the big five, which cover 90% of the market? Furthermore, in the Conservative manifesto there was a commitment to stop,
“children’s exposure to harmful sexualised content online, by requiring age verification for access to all sites containing pornographic material”.
Can the Minister say when the Government will deliver on this important manifesto commitment?
I turn to the wider impact of pornography on our society. I will begin by making some remarks which have been supplied by the judiciary. Earlier this year the Lord Chief Justice gave evidence to the Justice Committee in the other place and referred to deeply disturbing criminal cases which had been influenced and intensified by pornography. These were not only sexual offences against children, although that was a major concern, but offences against adults, and especially women. Many other judges have referred to the influence of pornography on criminals in relation to particular cases.
Looking beyond the influence of pornography on serious crime, there is a growing body of evidence that regular interaction with pornography often has an adverse effect upon the close family and intimate relationships that are such a crucial part of human flourishing. Human beings are characterised by a high degree of what I might call intersubjectivity. Through the acquisition of language and in other ways we have a great disposition and aptitude towards communicating with each other and developing deep interpersonal relationships. David Attenborough brought this out with typical brilliance in the last episode of his series “Life on Earth”, looking at human beings from a biological perspective.
The underlying problem with pornography is that in particularly significant and sensitive areas of human life it encourages people to view other people simply or primarily as objects to be used and discarded. The danger is that in tacitly or openly accepting the pervasive presence of adult pornography in people’s lives, we are choosing to make the attitudes which lie behind and in pornography seem normal: objectification, exploitation, and, very often, abuse.
As a society we have recognised the need to have vigorous procedures to protect children from abuse and harm, and have begun to realise how endemic and deep-seated abusive attitudes have been. This new awareness is entirely to be welcomed, and needs to be pursued with vigour. I hope that the new inquiry under Justice Lowell Goddard will do this and try to unravel the causes of this disastrous feature of recent history, including the growing and easy availability of pornographic material as one underlying cause.
However, this leaves young people still exposed to much damaging material which presents them with distorted images of life. If this is true of both boys and girls, it is girls who arguably suffer the worst consequences, with poor perceptions of their own bodies and the damage that flows from that. The sharing of sexually explicit images via the internet and mobile phones is another dimension of the potential harm, especially when they are shared with other people. In adults, of course, this can produce so-called revenge porn, which I am glad to say has recently been recognised as a criminal offence.
The damage which is inflicted, especially but not only on young people, should not be seen as only psychological. Indeed, we should not think that psychological damage is in itself less important than physical damage. There is growing evidence of a direct and potentially permanent impact upon the brain itself, which provides a biological aspect to the phenomenon of addiction to pornography. In preparation for this debate I contacted an experienced judge, who commented:
“I have seen a good number of cases where curiosities have become fused into compulsions because of this very dimension. Porn evidently produces something of an addictive neurochemical trap. The brain is affected biologically and a ‘new normal’ emerges. There is then (exactly as with drugs) often a quest for increased exposure, for increased stimulation and for more extreme images to arouse interest and retain attention. The pursuit of pleasure and release from sexual tension delivers only addiction and an actual decrease in pleasure unless fuelled by more extreme material”.
That is the comment of an experienced judge in our country.
I am grateful to the charity, Naked Truth, which attempts to help such addicts to recover from their addiction, for access to the academic studies that have been undertaken in this area. This is the UK equivalent to the American charity, Fight the New Drug, which is mentioned in the Library note. I believe that one day such charities will receive the recognition that has been given to Alcoholics Anonymous and anti-smoking charities. It took a long time for the serious health hazards associated with smoking or excessive alcohol consumption and addiction to be recognised. We recall how for years the tobacco industry disputed the causal link with harm. We have yet to face the damaging effect of the widespread availability and use of pornography, and in that case too there is a powerful industry that discourages us from doing so.
I should acknowledge, as the Library note sets out, that there is a significant problem of formulating a tight definition of what is pornographic and I did not want to spend a lot of my limited time attempting a definition: I acknowledge that issue. Yet neither can we use the difficulty of establishing a precise definition as an excuse for ignoring the very obviously problematic character of pornography at all levels in our society. My hope today in bringing this debate to your Lordships’ House is simply that: to engage in a debate and recognise how important the various issues raised by it are, perplexing though they may be in various ways.
As I understand it, to date the Government are content to try to draw a sharp distinction between children and adults as far as access to pornography is concerned. I can understand this attempt to protect the free choices that adults may make and I acknowledge the dangers of trying in some way to ban pornography. In the internet age this is unlikely to be successful, even if attempted, and such attempted curbs can easily be counterproductive in other ways. It is sometimes said that if something is banned in the Old Testament it was going on quite widely, so there are real issues about how we respond. Today, I want to draw to our attention an issue we are not very happy describing and talking about. Doing nothing does not seem right either, given the evidence that pornography clearly harms adults as well as children—men and women, but especially women. My question to the Government, and to us all, is whether it is right to strike a pose of neutrality in the face of the obvious damage and dangers of the adult use of pornography.
I would like to end in a way that may surprise some Members of the House, so as to indicate the nature of the underlying problem as I have come to see it. I find myself to some degree at least with an unexpected bedfellow, if I may put it that way, in DH Lawrence. I am not sure whether bishops have defended DH Lawrence in your Lordships’ House before. He has certainly had a long time to wait for it happen.
As I understand Lawrence, a central concern in his writings was a conviction that in European civilisation the relationship between mind and body has become seriously dislocated. The relatively innocent understanding of sex that one sees in Chaucer or Renaissance art—in Botticelli for example—declined over the years into the brutality of modern pornography. I would like to quote Lawrence, from a famous but neglected essay, Pornography and Obscenity. He said:
“Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it”.
He referred to this as,
“the catastrophe of our civilisation”.
He went on to say:
“I am sure no other civilisation, not even the Roman, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid, dirty sex”.
This is not the Bishop of Chester saying this but DH Lawrence, who wrote these prophetic words in 1929. What would he make of contemporary society? His vision was, I think, too idealistic, not least in how he saw human sexuality, but he did identify the problem that underlies the floodtide of unhealthy, objectifying, sexual pornography that we now confront. At its heart it is a spiritual problem, the problem of identifying and upholding a healthy view of human life in the context of the contemporary world’s attempt to reduce us to an undignified bundle of unfulfilled appetites.
I look forward to this debate and to the range of views that I am sure will be expressed on this difficult and, as I have said, perplexing subject.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
I thank the Minister for her comprehensive reply. There were a few questions that she did not cover; no doubt she will write to those concerned. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, mentioned Archdeacon Grantly from the Barchester chronicles. Unlike the Bishops, the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, referred to hell at one point. Archdeacon Grantly had his own definition of hell, which was an eternity of having to listen to his own sermons. Whether that applies to Members of your Lordships’ House having to listen to contributions here, I shall leave open.
The debate certainly demonstrated what a complex subject this is in a society that is developing so rapidly. I have said before that the internet age—the digital revolution—is like steam power in the 18th century and its impact on the 19th, or the internal combustion engine in the 19th and its impact on the 20th. Now we are doing the same for the 20th and the 21st. It is even more powerful than those earlier revolutions. It was very easy then to drift into problems without seeing them. We drifted into the First World War without realising that the whole nature of warfare had changed by industrialisation.
I hope that this debate has usefully aired a range of views on this subject, which we find difficult to talk about. In that respect, it has been very helpful. I am very pleased, if I may say so, that the two very distinguished social scientists spoke in the debate; I am enormously grateful for their contributions. Evidence is very important. We seem to agree pretty much that the evidence is there in relation to protecting children. Broadly speaking, there is agreement on that. There is less agreement on the question of harm to adults: that is an open question. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, who took a different line from me to some degree, said it was an issue that we hardly knew anything about. I agree with her on that, in many ways. She asked, “Does the chicken or the egg come first?”. When you are looking at a chicken omelette, that question becomes a bit academic. We will have to at least try to answer it.
I thank everyone who has taken part. The future must lie with research and education, and, I hope, digesting the lessons that we all learned in this debate.