Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Maria Miller Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

Lords amendments 70 to 72, 116, 118, 126 and 142 will make posting revenge porn a criminal offence, and I rise to support them. I have been campaigning on behalf of women who have contacted me to get a change in the law to make posting revenge pornography a crime, and today we have a chance to make a change that will literally transform the future for many people in our country. Nude or sexually explicit images taken as part of a private relationship and always intended to be private should stay private. People should expect better treatment under the law, and the amendments would ensure that that is the case in future.

The seemingly growing industry of revenge pornography, where images are posted for all to see, is completely unacceptable in our country and the law must reflect that. The current mishmash of legislation does not provide adequate protection. The posting of such images is often a one-off and therefore not subject to harassment legislation, or an image could be deemed not to be grossly offensive and therefore not subject to the Communications Act 2003 or the Malicious Communications Act 1988. There is therefore a need for a new law, and the Bill provides that opportunity.

I pay tribute to the Crown Prosecution Service which has attempted to provide better guidance in this area. However, as the police made clear in evidence sessions on revenge pornography with the Lords Bill Committee held during the summer, it is not necessarily against the law to post such pictures online. The amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill will close that loophole and provide comfort to hundreds or perhaps even thousands of men and women in this country who have had nude or sexually explicit images of them posted without their permission.

The law must keep up to date with the ever-evolving changes and challenges thrown down to us by the internet and digital technology. What is illegal offline is illegal online, but the impact of having a nude or sexually explicit image posted on the internet for thousands or even millions of people to see is entirely different from the impact of a similar image being distributed offline, and I believe that the law should reflect that. We need the law to keep pace with the internet, and I commend the Minister for listening to the arguments and being prepared to take action.

There are those who have said that a new law is not needed. Some have gone so far as to say to me that if a woman has a nude or sexually explicit photo taken in private, she has no right to expect protection under the law if that image is made public without her permission; that in some ways it is as if she was “asking for it”. I completely reject that argument as, I hope, will every Member of the House. The law needs to protect men and women and to send a clear message to the perpetrators of these heinous acts that their actions are not tolerated by this society or in criminal law.

I pay tribute to the work of Baroness Trish Morris and Elizabeth Berridge in the other place for working with me, and for making the case so powerfully and so successfully to enable us to debate these amendments today. I also pay tribute to Women’s Aid, the Safer Internet Centre, Ban Revenge Porn, and many others who have written to me in support of the amendments over the past six months. I thank the ministerial team and their officials for listening to the arguments and for acting, and I urge Members across the House to support the amendments.



If images are posted online, victims want them to be taken down quickly. Protocols put in place by internet service providers and social media in relation to child abuse images prove beyond doubt that the industry can, through its own actions, come together to remove illegal images effectively and swiftly. Good progress on child abuse has been made by the industry, working with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and other law enforcement agencies. The Minister perhaps needs to look at that work as a template for the sort of action the industry needs to take on the issue of revenge pornography. We need an industry-wide code of practice for removing revenge pornography to ensure that people have certainty that action will be taken.

The incidence of sexting among under-18s is now put as high as 20%, so the volume of potential revenge porn images in the future is alarming. Indeed, one in five reports from industry received by CEOP relates to self-generated indecent images of people under the age of 18. What will the Government do to put a stop to the already illegal practice of sending nude images of under-18s through mobile phones and then uploading them on to websites? This seems to be becoming increasingly accepted as part of society today, but it should not be. It is illegal and the Government need to act to stop this ticking time bomb of images that could haunt the next generation of people into adulthood.

Victims want help. They want an industry-wide reporting regime. They want help to be available. The Safer Internet Centre, which was established to support professionals who work with children, is now receiving calls from adults affected by revenge pornography, as they have nowhere else to turn to. In September, I met the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, the industry board that looks at these issues. I set out my concerns and asked the industry to take action. I asked for there to be an industry-standard reporting mechanism, an industry-standard response time for taking down illegal images of adults and support for victims through a helpline. This sort of industry-wide approach is what we should all expect from a mature multinational sector of our economy. We should not expect the burden of removing illegal images from commercial websites to be solely the responsibility of the police—the industry has an obligation to act too. If websites are hosted in more obscure countries, splash pages should be used to block illegal pornography images from being viewed in the UK in exactly the same way as they have been used to block child abuse images. It is a tried and tested methodology that can address this problem. I look forward to the Minister confirming today how he can handle the logistics in the future, working of course with other ministerial colleagues in other Departments.

I applaud the Government for acting when some were resistant. The Ministers have shown foresight and their actions will be warmly welcomed by those who have had to endure the appalling consequences of revenge pornography being posted online without their consent. On behalf of all those women—and the men affected, too—who have contacted me, I thank the Ministers for their work. I hope that in their response today they are able to provide some reassurance on the questions I have posed.

[Dr Huppert]

I, too, would like to speak to amendment 70. I will not detain the House for too long, as some of the points have already been raised. I called for this amendment when the Bill was going through this House and in the Queen’s Speech. It was very helpful after that to get the support of the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller) in her Westminster Hall debate.

There is a gap in the law that we are closing. It is surprising that, while there are many laws that touch on the issue of revenge porn, none of them quite tackles the essential issue. People were being harmed and a clear wrong was being done, but nothing could be done because there was a hole in the law. I am therefore delighted that the Government accepted the case. There has been substantial debate in the other place and I pay particular tribute to my colleagues Baroness Grender, Baroness Brinton, Baroness Barker and Lord Marks who tabled amendments in the other place. Between us, we have managed to get the Government to work out the amendments.

I pay tribute to the victims. I have spoken to many of them, but in particular I pay tribute to Hannah Thompson who has played a very key role in speaking out publicly. That was a very brave thing to do about something that feels very shaming. We should remember her work and pay tribute to her. She will protect many people in the future. The psychological trauma can be huge, as the right hon. Lady has already said. We have seen people face the shame—the sense they did something wrong—when it was someone else who behaved badly. People have lost confidence, they have lost their jobs and, in some cases around the world, they have committed suicide. I therefore welcome the Government’s steps to make this a new offence. It is absolutely the right thing to do. It sends a message that revenge porn should not be tolerated and people should not be able to share these intimate images, entrusted to them, and expect their actions to be completely unpunishable.

That will not be enough, however. Although the right hon. Lady spoke about automatic processes to filter these things out, there will be challenges. The work of the Internet Watch Foundation—I declare an interest as one of its champions—on child abuse images is fantastic, but it cannot be directly mapped on to images of revenge porn, because the images themselves are not the issue; it is about intent and consent. It is hard to distinguish automatically between an image shared voluntarily, which we should not be criminalising if the person is over 18, and an image shared involuntarily, which is the issue that the amendment would tackle. It is not as easy as in the case of child abuse images—not that that is trivial or easy either.

[Maria Miller]

For clarification, I was clearly pointing out that once an image had been identified as illegal, the same technology could be used to remove it from the internet. Obviously, this is about data-matching the images.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Lady is absolutely right about there being scope for data-matching images, and there is some nice work being done on technologies for hashing an image so that it can be identified, but it will be harder than in the case of child abuse images.

As I said in an intervention on the Minister, we need a substantial improvement in education not just around this offence—ideally we want a situation where no one is ever prosecuted under the offence because the message has been sent so clearly that people simply do not share intimate images of former partners or whomever—but on the much broader issue of sex and relationships education. For me, this is fundamentally an issue not about revenge or pornography—the term “revenge porn” is not ideal—but about consent. We need a system where, particularly through education, we get people to understand what consent is about: what can be agreed to and what cannot be agreed. Whether it is sexual assault and physical violence, emotional assault or the taking and spreading of such images, it should be about whether consent has been given. That is the education I would like to see. The Government should have compulsory sex and relationships education for everybody at school to tackle these issues of consent, and they should do what they can to ensure society changes so that we have that focus on consent. I welcome the amendments very much, and I am grateful the Government have agreed to them.

Very quickly, amendment 73 was led by the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), who did a fantastic job. I had the privilege of co-sponsoring the amendments, but she did the work, and I am not in any sense trying to claim credit. The amendment will make a big difference to grooming. Her approach to the amendments—working constructively with Ministers, discussing the issues, not trying to play party politics, but making the case sensibly and pragmatically—has delivered her success, and she should be very proud of getting the law changed to protect young people. Perhaps there is a lesson there for other right hon. and hon. Members about how to get the law changed.

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My right hon. Friend is also completely right about the social media and internet industry playing its part to deal with the terrible crime of revenge pornography. We cannot just expect the law to provide the complete solution; we need everyone to play their part. We need education and we need the industry to do its part as well.

[Maria Miller]

Will my hon. Friend join me in urging the industry to take action and put in place a code of practice to ensure that those affected by this dreadful crime know where to go, who to report the offence to and how long it will be before the images are taken down? People want certainty; they do not want the uncertainty that currently prevails.

[Andrew Selous]

Yet again, my right hon. Friend speaks very wisely. I agree with the challenge she has put to the industry. She is right to do that and I hope it will pay attention to the debate in this House. I am with her in the demands that she has quite properly placed on the industry in expecting it to fulfil its proper social responsibility in this regard. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge talked about the important role that victims have played, and I think he did the House a service by putting on record the role that victims have played in describing the terrible ordeal that they have been through. That has certainly helped inform our debate.

These amendments address a number of issues that have been brought to our attention by Members in the other place as well as those brought forward by the Government. I firmly believe that they enhance and improve the Bill, and I am proud to say that we are tackling the appalling behaviour known as revenge pornography, which has featured considerably in tonight’s debate. We are also addressing an important lacuna in the reporting restriction framework and introducing recall adjudicators to go some way to alleviate the pressure on the Parole Board. These and other measures are not only critical, but absolutely necessary. I urge the House to support them.

Lords amendment 1 agreed to.

Remaining Lords amendments agreed to, with Commons financial privileges waived in respect of Lords amendments 5 to 34, 75, 123 and 124

Ordered, That a Committee be appointed to draw up Reasons to be assigned to the Lords for disagreeing to their amendments.

That Dr Julian Huppert, Andrew Selous, Mr Andy Slaughter, Karl Turner, and Mr Ben Wallace be members of the Committee;

That Andrew Selous be the Chair of the Committee;

That three be the quorum of the Committee.

That the Committee do withdraw immediately.—(Damian Hinds.)

Committee to withdraw immediately; reasons to be reported and communicated to the Lords.