Online Safety Bill (Sixteenth sitting)

Maria Miller Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Chris Philp]

The shadow Minister is right to raise the issue of women and girls being disproportionately—one might say overwhelmingly—the victims of certain kinds of abuse online. We heard my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, the shadow Minister and others set that out in a previous debate. The shadow Minister is right to raise the issue.

Tackling violence against women and girls has been a long-standing priority of the Government. Indeed, a number of important new offences have already been and are being created, with protecting women principally in mind—the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour, set out in the Serious Crime Act 2015 and amended in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021; the creation of a new stalking offence in 2012; a revenge porn offence in 2015; and an upskirting offence in 2019. All of those offences are clearly designed principally to protect women and girls who are overwhelmingly the victims of those offences. Indeed, the cyber-flashing offence created by clause 156 —the first time we have ever had such an offence in this jurisdiction—will, again, overwhelmingly benefit women and girls who are the victims of that offence.

All of the criminal offences I have mentioned—even if they are not mentioned in schedule 7, which I will come to in a moment—will automatically flow into the Bill via the provisions of clause 52(4)(d). Criminal offences where the victim is an individual, which these clearly all are, automatically flow into the provisions of the Bill, including the offences I just listed, which have been created particularly with women in mind.

[Dame Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I hope that my hon. Friend will discuss the Law Commission’s recommendations on intimate image abuse. When I raised this issue in an earlier sitting, he was slightly unsighted by the fact that the recommendations were about to come out—I can confirm again that they will come out on 7 July, after some three years of deliberation. It is unfortunate that will be a week after the end of the Committee’s deliberations, and I hope that the timing will not preclude the Minister from mopping it up in his legislation.

[Chris Philp]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her question and for her tireless work in this area. As she says, the intimate image abuse offence being worked on is an extremely important piece in the jigsaw puzzle to protect women, particularly as it has as its threshold—at least in the previous draft—consent, without any test of intent, which addresses some points made by the Committee previously. As we have discussed before, it is a Ministry of Justice lead, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend will make representations to MOJ colleagues to elicit a rapid confirmation of its position on the recommendations, so that we can move to implement them as quickly as possible.

I remind the Committee of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which was also designed to protect women. Increased penalties for stalking and harassment have been introduced, and we have ended the automatic early release of violent and sex offenders from prison—something I took through Parliament as a Justice Minister a year or two ago. Previously, violent and sex offenders serving standard determinate sentences were often released automatically at the halfway point of their sentence, but we have now ended that practice. Rightly, a lot has been done outside the Bill to protect women and girls.

Let me turn to what the Bill does to further protect women and girls. Schedule 7 sets out the priority offences—page 183 of the Bill. In addition to all the offences I have mentioned previously, which automatically flow into the illegal safety duties, we have set out priority offences whereby companies must not just react after the event, but proactively prevent the offence from occurring in the first place. I can tell the Committee that many of them have been selected because we know that women and girls are overwhelmingly the victims of such offences. Line 21 lists the offence of causing

“intentional harassment, alarm or distress”.

Line 36 mentions the offence of harassment, and line 37 the offence of stalking. Those are obviously offences where women and girls are overwhelmingly the victims, which is why we have picked them out and put them in schedule 7—to make sure they have the priority they deserve.