Protecting Children Online

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, but writing algorithms to do that on millions and millions of websites simply cannot be done correctly. I shall come back to that, although I know that the hon. Lady and the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham are not concerned about the errors that would be made.

It is absolutely right to provide tools for parents to control what is happening. They should be the ones empowered to look after their children. I would rather trust the parents to look after their children than require state-level controls. It is absolutely right to have those available for people to use and to make them easy and clear to use. I think there should be no default because I think we should encourage parents to engage with the question before they make a decision. They should be faced with a box that they have to tick, but they should be in charge. The Byron review was very clear that a false sense of security could be created if we just tell people that everything is safe.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

The problem here is that we are not dealing with simply looking at a book or magazine and deciding whether it is suitable for a child. We are dealing with something that many people have said—this has been the focus of much of the research—they find very difficult to operate. The outcome is that many parents are not able to use those filters.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Lady is right, which is exactly why we need simpler filters. The work done by Talk Talk and others provides precisely that. There should be simple clear filters with simple clear questions so that parents can have a look and make a simple clear decision. I do not want to force parents to abdicate that responsibility because there are other consequences of these filters.

Any filtering system will have large errors. There will be errors that mean it does not filter out some things that we might want it to filter out because it cannot be sorted out perfectly. There is no way of indentifying automatically what counts as pornography and what does not; what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. That is simply impossible to achieve, so stuff will get through that we are not expecting to get through. There is also the problem of filtering some useful things out. There are already many cases—when it comes to advice for lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, for example—where mobile phone providers automatically filter out the content, which can cause serious harm to young people trying to get advice. Trying to get advice about abortion services is another problem. There are a whole range of such issues that are automatically filtered out by many mobile phone providers. If we are telling children that we do not want to let them have appropriate information, that can be damaging.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

While we are all patting ourselves on the back and saying that there is widespread agreement—and there clearly is widespread agreement—we should also bear it in mind that there is a considerable campaign against the taking of steps in this direction. It has not really been represented in the House today, but it is clear from earlier debates, and from communications that we have all received, that there is another point of view which is very different. There are people who want a degree of freedom in society that can actually be damaging, and we must be prepared to have a proper debate about that as well.

The issue of freedom is very important in the history of events such as the women’s movement, but there has often been a confusion between freedom in a fairly abstract sense—for instance, the sexual liberation of the 1960s—and the effect that some material can have on, in particular, those who are vulnerable. Much of what appears on the internet and elsewhere is damaging because of the way in which it portrays women, the way in which it portrays relationships between men and women, and the way in which it allows people to see a version of human relations that is deeply damaging.

People sometimes say that such material will not be harmful to many people, but it probably will be. It is interesting that the same argument is never advanced about advertising. People do not advertise because they think that advertising does not work; they advertise because they think that advertisements influence us, and indeed we are all clearly influenced by them. We have all found ourselves going into a shop and buying something that we may not have meant to buy because we saw or heard an advertisement for it, and thought “That sounds like a good idea.” I am not suggesting that someone who stumbles across pornography, online or anywhere else, is bound to turn into a violent person, but there will be some people whose attitudes, particularly their attitudes to what is acceptable between men and women, will be affected by it.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend has made an important point about the availability of images on the internet. There are more child abuse images circulating on the internet now than ever before. As a result of freedom of information requests by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, about 26 million images were seized in two years by five local forces. Does my hon. Friend agree that the availability of such material is leading to a potential normalisation of it, and that that is one of the most important problems that we must tackle in the interests of our children today?

[Sheila Gilmore]

I agree that we should take that problem very seriously, and should take action to deal with it.

This is not only about protecting children, although that is extremely important. It is also about protecting older young people, and about protecting adults and, hopefully, changing their views. I think that if certain types of behaviour are normalised and become commonplace, they will eventually be seen as broadly acceptable, and the relationships that are portrayed between men and women will be considered not unacceptable, but something that women themselves are almost expected to accept.

I think that it is important to deal with this. I thought that it was important many years ago when groups were campaigning about, for example, pornography in magazines, but this type of pornography is pervasive in a way that even that was not. Going to buy a magazine in a shop was a more difficult transaction for many people than what we now see happening in our homes.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

Does my hon. Friend also think that ISPs have a vested interest in that regard? If adults had to opt in to view adult sites and pornography, that would almost certainly have an impact on business and the number of people choosing that option.

[Sheila Gilmore]

In many ways, I would hope that that was not the case. I do not know where the ISPs make their money, but many of us are critical of their reluctance in this matter. One or two Members have suggested today that, because some of the proposals would not be perfect and would not screen out everything and because some organisations and people might be clever enough to get around them in various technical ways that we do not necessarily fully understand, we should not take those steps. As in so much of our political and social lives, we should not make the best the enemy of the good. If we can do something to improve things, we should do it.

[Alun Cairns]

I want to highlight that I am a strong advocate and fan of filters, but I think it is very dangerous to give the impression that they are the whole answer. The solution is far more complicated than that and we must be clear about it.

[Sheila Gilmore]

We must not approach this at cross purposes. I do not think that anyone is saying that any of the proposals are perfect; we are merely seeking to improve the situation and to give greater protection. I have no doubt that there will be some very clever people who can find ways around all sorts of things—we know that that happens—but to say that we should not put such measures in place for that reason would be wholly wrong.

Let me address some of what the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) said. He seemed, perhaps surprisingly, to be setting the state against the parent in a way that is not helpful. Of course parents should be making decisions for their children, but there are many circumstances in which we have to rely on others in schools and in the wider world to protect our children. That is not an abdication of parental responsibility, because parents cannot be with their child all the time. They will not be able to supervise every social contact they have. As a parent, I would certainly prefer to be confident that I could let my children out into a world that I could regard as reasonably safe—whether that was the physical or virtual world—than to be unable to do so. Perhaps that is not what the hon. Gentleman was suggesting, but that was how it came across to me. Suggesting that such an approach somehow does not leave things to the parents and that it wants the state to step in is a wholly wrong way of considering the matter.

[Dr Huppert]

The concern is that the filters will be easy to bypass and that a huge proportion of young people will be able to get past them. If parents are led to believe that such things mean that their children will not be able to access inappropriate material when they are up in their room on their computer, that will lead them to make the wrong decisions about how best to look after their children. It is not that parents do not know how to do that—as we know from when parents were asked about the subject by Ofcom, this is a question of supervision, which is far more effective than a misleading sense of security.

[Sheila Gilmore]

One of the practical problems with that approach is the notion that someone is, in any sense, going to be there supervising their children through all this—we all do our best. We attempt to instil the values and behaviours that we want in our children, but it would be wrong to suggest that that will always work, even for those of us who think, or hope, we are or have been very good parents. Children grow older and they are out in that wider world—in friends’ homes or out in all sorts of other social contexts. I want my children to be protected from being able to buy alcohol when they are too young to buy it. I do not want to have to accompany them everywhere to make sure they do not do that; I want to be sure that they are, within reason, protected. However, I know that that can be got round as well, because I know that children are very good at getting fake IDs. That does not mean that we should just abandon the attempt to control these things.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—