Online Safety Bill

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 5th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The last Back-Bench speaker is Miriam Cates.

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I think you are the third person to take the Chair during the debate. It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris); I agree with everything that she said, and my comments will be similar.

This has been a long but fascinating debate. We have discussed only a small part of the Bill today, and just a few amendments, but the wide range of the debate reflects the enormous complexity of what the Bill is intended to do, which is to regulate the online world so that it is subject to rules, regulations, obligations and protective measures equivalent to those in the offline world. We must do this, because the internet is now an essential part of our infrastructure. I think that we see the costs of our high-speed broadband as being in the same category as our energy and water costs, because we could not live without it. Like all essential infrastructure, the internet must be regulated. We must ensure that providers are working in the best interests of consumers, within the law and with democratic accountability.

Regulating the internet through the Bill is not a one-off project. As many Members have said, it will take years to get it right, but we must begin now. I think the process can be compared with the regulation of roads. A century ago there were hardly any private motor cars on the roads. There were no rules; people did not even have to drive on a particular side of the road. There have been more than 100 years of frequent changes to rules and regulations to get it right. It seems crazy now to think there was a time when there were no speed limits and no seat belts. The death rates on the roads, even in the 1940s, were 13 times higher than they are now. Over time, however, with regulation, we have more or less solved the complex problems of road regulation. Similarly, it will take time to get this Bill right, but we must get it on to the statute book and give it time to evolve.

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[Dean Russell]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the work of charities such as Dignify in Watford, where Helen Roberts does incredible work in raising awareness of this issue, is essential to ensuring that people are aware of the harm that can be done?

[Miriam Cates]

I completely agree. Other charities, such as CEASE—the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation —and Barnardo’s have been mentioned in the debate, and I think it so important to raise awareness. There are many harms in the internet, but pornography is an epidemic. It makes up a third of the material on the internet, and its impact on children cannot be overstated. Many boys who watch porn say that it gives them ideas about the kind of sex that they want to try. It is not surprising that a third of child sexual abuse is committed by other children. During puberty—that very important period of development—boys in particular are subject to an erotic imprint. The kind of sex that they see and the sexual ideas that they have during that time determine what they see as normal behaviour for the rest of their lives. It is crucial for children to be protected from harmful pornography that encourages the objectification and abuse of—almost always—women.

[Neale Hanvey]

I thank—in this context—my hon. Friend for giving way.

The lawsuits are coming. There can certainly be no more harmful act than encouraging a young person to mutilate their body with so-called gender-affirming surgery with no therapeutic intervention beforehand. In Scotland, the United Nations special rapporteur for violence against women and girls has criticised the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Does the hon. Lady agree that it is time to establish who is a feminist, and who is a fake to their fingertips?

[Miriam Cates]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is absolutely right: inciting a child to harm their body, whatever that harm is, should be criminalised, and I support the sentiment of new clause 16, which seeks to do that. Sadly, lots of children, particularly girls, go online and type in “I don’t like my body”. Maybe they are drawn to eating disorder sites, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) has mentioned, but often they are drawn into sites that glorify transition, often with adult men that they do not even know in other countries posting pictures of double mastectomies on teenage girls.

[John Nicolson (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)]

The hon. Lady must realise that this is fantasy land. It is incredibly difficult to get gender reassignment surgery. The “they’re just confused” stuff is exactly what was said to me as a young gay man. She must realise that this really simplifies a complicated issue and patronises people going through difficult choices.

[Miriam Cates]

I really wish it was fantasy land, but I am in contact with parents each and every day who tell me stories of their children being drawn into this. Yes, in this country it is thankfully very difficult to get a double mastectomy when you are under 18, but it is incredibly easy to buy testosterone illegally online and to inject it, egged on by adults in other countries. Once a girl has injected testosterone during puberty, she will have a deep voice and facial hair for life and male-pattern baldness, and she will be infertile. That is a permanent change, it is self-harm and it should be criminalised under this Bill, whether through this clause or through the Government’s new plans. The hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey) is absolutely right: this is happening every day and it should be classed as self-harm.

Going back to my comments about the effect on children of viewing pornography, I absolutely support the idea of putting children’s experience at the heart of the Bill but it needs to be about children’s welfare and not about what children want. One impact of the internet has been to blur the boundary between adults and children. As adults, we need to be able to say, “This is the evidence of what is harmful to children, and this is what children should not be seeing.” Of course children will say that they want free access to all content, just like they want unlimited sweets and unlimited chocolate, but as adults we need to be able to say what is harmful for children and to protect them from seeing it.

This bring me to Government new clause 11, which deals with making sure that child sexual abuse material is taken offline. There is a clear link between the epidemic of pornography and the epidemic of child sexual abuse material. The way the algorithms on porn sites work is to draw users deeper and deeper into more and more extreme content—other Members have mentioned this in relation to other areas of the internet—so someone might go on to what they think is a mainstream pornography site and be drawn into more and more explicit, extreme and violent criminal pornography. At the end of this, normal people are drawn into watching children being abused, often in real time and often in other countries. There is a clear link between the epidemic of porn and the child sexual abuse material that is so prevalent online.

Last week in the Home Affairs Committee we heard from Professor Alexis Jay, who led the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Her report is harrowing, and it has been written over seven years. Sadly, its conclusion is that seven years later, there are now even more opportunities for people to abuse children because of the internet, so making sure that providers have a duty to remove any child sexual abuse material that they find is crucial. Many Members have referred to the Internet Watch Foundation. One incredibly terrifying statistic is that in 2021, the IWF removed 252,194 web pages containing child sexual abuse material and an unknown number of images. New clause 11 is really important, because it would put the onus on the tech platforms to remove those images when they are found.

It is right to put the onus on the tech companies. All the way through the writing of this Bill, at all the consultation meetings we have been to, we have heard the tech companies say, “It’s too hard; it’s not possible because of privacy, data, security and cost.” I am sure that is what the mine owners said in the 19th century when they were told by the Government to stop sending children down the mines. It is not good enough. These are the richest, most powerful companies in the world. They are more powerful than an awful lot of countries, yet they have no democratic accountability. If they can employ real-time facial recognition at airports, they can find a way to remove child abuse images from the internet.

This leads me on to new clause 17, tabled by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), which would introduce individual director liability for non-compliance. I completely support that sentiment and I agree that this is likely to be the only way we will inject some urgency into the process of compliance. Why should directors who are profiting from the platforms not be responsible if children suffer harm as a result of using their products? That is certainly the case in many other industries. The right hon. Lady used the example of the building trade. Of course there will always be accidents, but if individual directors face the prospect of personal liability, they will act to address the systemic issues, the problems with the processes and the malevolent algorithms that deliberately draw users towards harm.

[Sir William Cash]

My hon. Friend knows that I too take a great interest in this, and I am glad that the Government have agreed to continue discussions on this question. Is she aware that the personal criminal liability for directors flows from the corporate criminal liability in the company of which they are a director, and that their link to the criminal act itself, even if the company has not been or is not being prosecuted, means that the matter has to be made clear in the legislation, so that we do not have any uncertainty about the relationship of the company director and the company of which he is a director?

[Miriam Cates]

I was not aware of that, but I am now. I thank my hon. Friend for that information. This is a crucial point. We need the accountability of the named director associated with the company, the platform and the product in order to introduce the necessary accountability. I do not know whether the Minister will accept this new clause today, but I very much hope that we will look further at how we can make this possible, perhaps in another place.

I very much support the Bill. We need to get it on the statute book, although it will probably need further work, and I support the Government amendments. However, given the link between children viewing pornography and child sexual abuse, I hope that when the Bill goes through the other place, their lordships will consider how regulations around pornographic content can be strengthened, in order to drastically reduce the number of children viewing porn and eventually being drawn into criminal activities themselves. In particular, I would like their lordships to look at tightening and accelerating the age verification and giving equal treatment to all pornography, whether it is on a porn site or a user-to-user service and whether it is online or offline. Porn is harmful to children in whatever form it comes, so the liability on directors and the criminality must be exactly the same. I support the Bill and the amendments in the Government’s name, but it needs to go further when it goes to the other place.

[Paul Scully]

I thank Members for their contributions during today’s debate and for their ongoing engagement with such a crucial piece of legislation. I will try to respond to as many of the issues raised as possible.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is not in his place, proposed adding in promoting self-harm as a criminal offence. The Government are sympathetic to the intention behind that proposal; indeed, we asked the Law Commission to consider how the criminal law might address that, and have agreed in principle to create a new offence of encouraging or assisting serious self-harm. The form of the offence recommended by the Law Commission is based on the broadly comparable offence of encouraging or assisting suicide. Like that offence, it covers the encouragement of, or assisting in, self-harm by means of communication and in other ways. When a similar amendment was tabled by the hon. Members for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) and for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) in Committee, limiting the offence to encouragement or assistance by means of sending a message, the then Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, said it would give only partial effect to the Law Commission’s recommendation. It remains the Government’s intention to give full effect to the Law Commission’s recommend-ations in due course.