Seema Kennedy
Main Page: Seema Kennedy (Conservative - South Ribble)
Seema Kennedy (South Ribble) (Con)
I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), and to the Backbench Business Committee. My right hon. Friend is a great champion of causes such as this, and I think that the passion that is being expressed in every speech shows how important the issue is.
Twenty-one years ago, I sat with a wise and, I now realise, very farsighted friend, and we talked about a new phenomenon called the internet. All that I knew about it was that the scientists at university used it to send messages to each other, but he said that we would live through a revolution as great and thrilling as that wrought by the proliferation of newsprint in the 17th century, which would lead to a new way of communicating— indeed, a complete shift in social discourse—and so it has proved. I have returned to that conversation many times over the past two decades, and never more so than in preparing for this debate. We, as legislators, are print children, on the whole, but we need to draft laws for our digital children.
I would like to quote from Lord Toulson’s dissenting judgment in the case of PJS v. News Group Newspapers. I am sure that hon. Members know of that case. It involves a celebrity couple who were trying to stop the publication of their identities in print form, even though their names were widely quoted on the internet. Lord Toulson said:
“The court must live in the world as it is and not as it would like it to be”
and
“the court needs to be very cautious about granting an injunction preventing publication of what is widely known, if it is not to lose public respect for the law by giving the appearance of being out of touch with reality.”
I am not passing comment on the rights or wrongs of that particular case, but making the point that we, as legislators, must adapt to the new lives, and threats, that face all of us today.
Online abuse is crime. It is not banter, it is not teasing, and it is not fair exercise of free speech. The hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) spoke very powerfully. Indeed, many hon. Members—females, although I am glad now to see some men in the Chamber—have talked about their own experiences. I pay tribute to them, as I do to the victim statement that we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell). Online abuse, in and of itself, is a crime in terms of the effects that it has on its victims: anxiety, depression, and changes in everyday behaviour resulting in people staying at home and not being able to go to their jobs. Sometimes it leads to suicide. Crucially, online abuse is a gateway to real-world stalking, physical and sexual abuse, and even murder. Digital-Trust has highlighted the murders of Angela Hoyt, Ildiko Dohany, Lorna Smith and Sofyen Belamouadden, all of which began in the virtual world. Like many hon. Members, I am sure, every time I meet teachers they report online abuse as one of the factors in the growth of mental health problems in the young over the past decade.
In terms of crime prevention and reduction, there need to be constant changes to environmental and societal attitudes which run in parallel with, or sometimes slightly behind, changes in the law. Many hon. Members have said that there needs to be cultural change as well as legislative change, but looking back on social changes over the past half century, often we in this place are the leaders and society follows us.
Anna Turley
I am very grateful for the strength of feeling expressed across the House. I have introduced a private Member’s Bill, to be debated in March, to address malicious communications on social media. I would be delighted to work with colleagues from across the House and, I hope, Ministers, to see whether we can use that as a vehicle for the legislative change that the hon. Lady talks about.
Seema Kennedy
I applaud the hon. Lady’s private Member’s Bill, and I am sure that lots of people will support her next year.
On legislative and societal changes going in step together, let us think about the strides that have been taken over the past 40 years in changing society’s attitudes to physical and sexual violence against women and children. When I started at law school, rape in marriage was still allowed. When we were all at primary school, our teachers were allowed to smack us around the head. We had to legislate on these things before society followed us. It is incumbent on us, as legislators, to lead that charge.
Schools now take very seriously their duties to children with regard to bullying and what happens in the playground, but we must also make the virtual playground where many of our children and grandchildren spend so much time—indeed, we all do—a safe space for them. The internet, as compared with the real world, is still largely ungoverned. Some people argue that it is an ungovernable space where an online abuser’s odious views go unchallenged. In fact, they are not just unchallenged but reinforced, amplified and nurtured.
Having spoken to my area’s chief constable in Lancashire, I know how much time he and all his colleagues take in dealing with online abuse, yet, try as they might, they need more support. Victim Support has said—many hon. Members have quoted these statistics—that only 7,500 out of 125,000 police officers have been specially trained to investigate digital crime. I ask the Minister to make representations to Home Office Ministers about plans to increase that number.
There is currently a plethora of laws that deal with online abuse. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, very politely, used the word “piecemeal”. I think we might better call it a ragbag of laws. I urge the Government to carry out a wholesale review of these laws so that we are not out of touch with reality. I wholeheartedly echo and agree with my right hon. Friend’s suggested changes.
Our current law of libel had its origins in the 17th century proliferation of newsprint. We need to respond to the current revolution in communication and social discourse by legislating, in the words of Lord Toulson, for
“the world as it is and not as”
we
“would like it to be.”
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
I have met my fair share of bullies in my time. As you may have noticed, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am, as they used to say in my home town of Liverpool, a chap who is built like a brick outhouse—I think that is the parliamentary version of the term—so bullies have not really bothered me much over the years. However, I am aware, not least as a father, that the internet and social media have brought about two big changes that have meant that I probably would not have avoided bullying were I a teenager now.
First, bullying is now 24/7. As other Members have said, it is inescapable. There is no refuge from bullying these days—no chance to get home, shut the back door and sit down to your fish fingers safe in the knowledge that it will not occur again, at least for a few hours. Secondly, social media has unfortunately decreased our children’s resilience, creating a whole host of exploitable vulnerabilities, including eating disorders, self-harm, harmful sexual behaviour, depression and anxiety. For teenagers, many of whom are hard-wired to take the judgments of others to heart, the amplification of bullying that the online world allows will obviously lead to more permanent damage.
As many Members have said, it is pretty shocking that we have allowed things to get to this stage. We seem to have sleepwalked into an epidemic of terrible mental health, particularly among children, whose self-confidence has been wrecked by social media with its unrealistic expectations and the kind of digital solipsism that it seems to encourage. Perhaps it is because we have been too wrapped up in our own smartphones to notice their obsession—too wrapped up to remember that there are two distinct types of people in society: adults and children. It is the job of adults to make decisions about the boundaries that protect children from harm even when they do not always like it. Instead, I fear that we have become carried away by technology, which has led us to become too indulgent to be seen to be backtracking.
The current generation of teenagers are glued, perhaps irreversibly, to a social media world filled with images of continuously perfect, happy people—so obviously fictional—paired with the unavoidable realisation that they can never attain that ideal. The result is both an insatiable sense of entitlement combined with a crushing hopelessness, which can only lead to self-loathing and anger. They are too often made to feel like failures. Throw into that mix the pressure of exams and the signal sent to children that their entire future and value as a person rests on their academic performance and social standing at school, and it is no wonder that cyber-bullying is the trigger for a whole host of problems. Such pressures contribute to deep unhappiness and many feel the need to put on a brave face and not burden their families, which compounds the isolation. As the president of ChildLine, Esther Rantzen, wrote recently, unhappiness and low self-esteem are the main new phenomena that the organisation is seeing. It only appeared in the top five of children’s worries a couple of years ago but accounted for 35,244 of their counselling sessions last year alone. Make no mistake, we have done little to halt the trend and it is only going to get worse. We must not consign the next generation of teenagers to the same fate.
Turning to the main subject of the debate, the resilience-sapping effect of social media and the addiction to smartphones are far more fundamental and intractable than the cyber-bullying issue, which is a product of them. There is much to be said about how we tackle cyber-bullying. Many people need to be involved in that conversation and consultation, which will have to include the mega-corporations, such as Facebook, that are the common platforms on which the problem occurs. We have let the resilience issue get out of control as a result of complacency in Parliament and an inertia in law, and we need to address them with more urgency than the bullying.
Like many Members, I hope that the response to the bullying issue will take the shape of a new online offences Act, which would replace the 30-plus pieces of legislation currently covering online abuse. It would include, among other things, a specific online abuse offence as well as an extensive definition of the duties of internet service providers in relation to young people. On resilience, we also need to get on with a children and young persons Act that is fit for this age, in which we can clearly define the duties of parents, in law, to help them cope with the impact of social media on their children. It is plainly not right that under-16s spend an average of three hours a day online, making them, according to experts, much more likely to suffer mental health problems, or that two in three 12 to l5-year-olds have their own smartphone given that parents have no idea what they are doing on them.
Spending too much time on social media has been shown to inhibit personal development by many different researchers, including in research carried out by the Government. We must be less complacent about the evidence. The change has been allowed to happen partly owing to parliamentary complacency, but also parental naivety and short-sightedness, and we need to put things right. No one is particularly to blame. That this House has failed to consider the issue properly is down to the same reason that parents across the country and around the world get caught out so badly by the change. Nothing comparable was around when we were growing up, and we are not equipped with the knowledge or understanding to guide children in their use of social media, especially as children themselves seem to be driving the evolution of the platforms on a daily basis.
The pace of change also explains how the main pieces of legislation on children are so out of date. The Children and Young Persons Act 1933 and the Children Act 1989 constructed the framework under which we still operate today, but obviously they do not have anything to say about parents’ duties to children in the social media age or about cyber-bullying. Making it harder still, it appears that getting the guidance and supervision right requires a level of intrusiveness that was not commonplace among parents of previous generations, one that children today will certainly resent and resist. Understandably, given where we are now, any group of teenagers would react with horror at the idea of handing their smartphones in at the beginning of the school day and picking them up at home time.
Seema Kennedy
My hon. Friend says that teenagers might resist that, but he began by saying that there are two groups of people in this world—adults and children—and surely it is incumbent on us adults to make them give these things up.
Kit Malthouse
Exactly, as I was about to say. Let me continue: but I will be firm here and say that the reason we have not done something in a systematic way, when teachers and experts on children have been telling us for some time that there was trouble brewing, is down to an increased weakness of parents and some teachers who act as though it was the children who should set the rules. Once again, adults seem to be unwilling to act as adults, meaning action has been weak or tentative. However, given the gravity of the situation in children’s mental health, in particular, we obviously cannot afford for that to continue. We need a new direction from which to approach this important area, but it is right to deal with the causes as well as the fallout.
I fear that this situation is again down to an indulgence that leads people to the conclusion that we can never declare that what someone is doing is harmful or bad for them, even when that person is not yet an adult and cannot be expected to understand properly what is good for them. Increased funding for talking therapies for distressed young people, which everybody has been pushing for over the past few months, is right, but no amount of therapy will stem the tide of the children’s mental health crisis if the root cause of why we need this resilience is not addressed.
I agree with many hon. Members who have spoken today about the need for legislation to clarify and consolidate the law relating to offences committed online. More fundamentally, however, we need to look more seriously at the resilience of children, at availability and at the time they spend online, and decide for ourselves, as parents and as a country, whether we should set firmer boundaries about what they can and cannot do in their own time.