Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill

Lord Swinfen Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull]

My Lords, Amendment 4 stands in the names of my noble friend Lord Marks and myself. The proposed new subsections (3A) and (3B) in Amendment 4 would widen the offence to all disclosures made without consent, with a get-out clause to cover the situation if a picture is inadvertently taken—for example, by a member of the paparazzi.

Researchers from Durham University have found that upskirt videos are easily and freely available on mainstream pornography websites. Over a period of just six months they found close to 2,500 videos on the landing page of the UK’s top three most accessed porn sites, depicting acts that can be classed as forms of image-based sexual abuse. Importantly, these titles were on the very front page of these mainstream sites, freely and easily accessible for a first-time user. They are not hidden.

We know from victim-survivors that their intimate images often end up on porn sites, viewed thousands of times and seriously amplifying the harms that they experience, making things worse. Once the images are uploaded to porn sites, getting them taken down from all sites is then extremely difficult.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, mentioned Scotland. As we know, Scotland has recently criminalised the distribution of upskirting images. Its new law came into effect in July last year. Since then, 421 incidents have been recorded by police. Analysts have concluded that while some of these cases might have been recorded as a different crime or offence had they occurred prior to the new law coming into effect, it is likely that the clear majority of them would not have been classified as a sexual crime.

It is also the case that the enactment of that legislation extended the criminal law to criminalise certain conduct that previously might not have been illegal. This analysis demonstrates that an offence of distribution is a useful tool for the police, and I hope the Minister will also recognise the value of such an offence.

[Lord Swinfen (Con)]

My Lords, I have one quick question: does this apply to men wearing kilts as well as to women wearing skirts?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

My Lords, I can address that question very quickly: yes, it does. This is a non-gender-specific piece of legislation.

Amendment 4 would create a further offence of disclosing an upskirt image to another person without the consent of the person in the image. It would also provide for two defences for this offence: namely, that the disclosure of the image was necessary for the purposes of preventing or detecting crime, or that the image was not disclosed with the intent of disclosing an image of another person’s genitals, buttocks or underwear.

The Government share the concerns around the onward sharing of upskirt images and understand the very real harm that this causes victims. It is important to send a clear message that sharing such images without consent is unacceptable and causes humiliation, alarm and distress. It is therefore important that we ensure that the law is sufficiently robust to protect victims from this disturbing practice. However, the Bill is intended to close a small gap in the law around the taking of upskirt images, which is just one aspect of a far wider problem. Legislating for the non-consensual sharing of intimate or naked images, including upskirt images, is a far more complex issue than the offences covered by the Bill.

That is why the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice committed in the other place to ask the Law Commission to review the taking and sharing of all non-consensual intimate images. This will be a broad review looking at how technological change has enabled new types of harmful behaviour and how the law needs to evolve to tackle it. The Ministry of Justice is currently working with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Law Commission to consider how best to take this important and wide-ranging piece of work forward. This will build on the detailed and insightful report on online and offensive communications published by the Law Commission on 1 November. The report makes several recommendations about how the criminal law could be reformed to tackle abusive and harmful online communications.