Online Safety Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, like every noble Lord today I welcome the arrival of this Bill after such a long wait. Like many others, I will focus my remarks on pornography. Standing back and looking at what has shaped and is shaping our society, we cannot ignore the fact that never in the history of humankind have we been so deluged by pornography. Graphic sexual activity is accessed through the internet on the push of a button and is almost impossible not to stumble across.

What we have been missing up to recently is the data on what this deluge is doing to us all. We have heard a lot about the Children’s Commissioner and her report yesterday. Her research found that most young people have seen pornography on Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat. Moreover, online pornography is not the same as the blue magazines previously available only by reaching up to the top shelf of the newsagents for those who had the chutzpah in those days to do it.

The adult content accessible in our youth is, she says, “quaint” compared to today’s online pornography displays. Pouting page three-type nude stills have given way to video portrayals of degrading, sexually coercive, aggressive, violent, pain-inducing and exploitative acts being perpetrated particularly against teenage girls and, of course, younger children. The title of her report published this week—'A Lot of it is Actually Just Abuse’—says it all. She highlights the dangers of the normalisation of sexual violence and the template this provides for children’s understanding and expectations of sex and relationships.

Her stats are a litany of innocence despoiled. Half of children have seen pornography by age 13; some 10% by age nine and more than a quarter by age 11. Some 79% see violent pornography before age 18 and frequent users are more likely to engage, as we have heard, in physically aggressive sex acts.

While I am most concerned about the impact of pornography on children and young people, we cannot ignore its prolific use by adults. International studies show high frequency of pornography use is associated with poor semen quality and reproductive hormone quantity, as well as erectile dysfunction with flesh-and-blood partners. Meta analyses show pornography use is never positively associated with relationship quality.

So, while the Bill has been much strengthened, I will support noble Lords, such as the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, who table amendments requiring that: first, all pornography websites and social media platforms implement third-party age verification; secondly, that there is a Bill-wide definition of pornographic content; thirdly, that online pornographic content is regulated in the same way as offline; and, fourthly, that all pornographic sites must ensure actors are genuinely over 18 so they are not facilitating child sex abuse.

To reiterate, the pornification of society is skewing our values and practices towards cruelty and selfish gratification in intimate relationships. It is undermining efforts to tackle abuse and violence, particularly against women and girls. Not bringing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 into force was a dereliction of duty. I was involved at Report stage, and strong forces were clearly at work to preclude hampering adult access to pornography—even to material that would have been illegal offline. The priority then seemed to be securing adults’ continued access to violent, misogynist, racist and degrading material and protecting their privacy.

Almost six years on, my and others’ plea is that we strike a better balance: introduce an age-verification regime at the speed befitting this public and mental health emergency. Third-party providers can give adults the privacy they crave and children the protection to which they are entitled in a civilised society. For too long, we have bowed a knee to cyber libertarian ideology that says internet regulation is impossible, unworkable and unwanted. This Bill must take big, bold, well-evidenced steps to reverse the decades of harm this ideology has caused.