International Women’s Day

Lord Mann Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the role models we have heard about are incredibly powerful for young girls out there, but they are also incredibly powerful role models for young boys. In the past 15 years, the world we live in has been totally transformed. Young boys are not being brought up in the era of surreptitiously passing around dodgy magazines, but are having an extremist male perspective on sex and sexuality thrust upon them in their pockets. We have not adjusted society, our laws or our intervention virtually at all to deal with this situation.

Gender-based violence is about power and its misuse, and power imbalance. The internet gives the additional weapon of revenge porn, but the normality of what the internet is doing is the most insidious of all. With the online harms Bill we will have the opportunity, if we chose, to do something about it. Will we be focused enough to do things that will have an impact and will we be courageous enough to take the necessary step to redress the balance? The time bomb is not to just ticking; it has been ticking. It is enacting.

I have done an awful lot of work representing survivors of child abuse. I still represent men and women who were severely abused. Just one of the conclusions from the significant number who come to me is that men are more comfortable reporting childhood abuse when it is non-sexual but is violent. I have not had a single case where the violence against a girl was not sexual, and often very violent. The level of unreported cases is what really frightens me. I know from the work I did, and from the people who came up to me on doorsteps and in the street and reported things to me, how child abuse is phenomenally unreported.

We have another problem. I also became frighteningly familiar with cases of sexual assaults on young women by their acquaintances. These cases were not being reported—not to the police, not to any authorities, not to family and often not even to partners. The assaults were discussed just within small, tight-knit groups of women. Hence I was able to find the frightening scale. The projections I got are extraordinary.

The world we live in has changed. The internet is a key part of that change but it is more than that, of course. We are not adjusting to it in our own place of work. When I spoke in the Commons about this sort of thing a significant number of men and women came forward with their experiences. Some had complained before and some had not. What was egregious was that, when people complained, the attitudes of the parties and the authorities were excruciating. There has been a slight shift but we have hardly moved on this. Let us get our own back yard in order and let us have courage when it comes to the online harms Bill.