Protecting Children Online

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

My constituency is not that far from where the tragic death of April Jones took place, and there was much reflection in the communities that make up my constituency on the issues surrounding that death, and on the mindset of Mark Bridger. I do not make any pretence of great technical knowledge, and I was reminded of that point yet again yesterday when I failed to add a printer to my computer; instead, I went on to another. That is not the issue. For me, this is not a general, abstract debate on what is, and what is not, censorship. It is about how things that would not in a million years be legal offline seem to be legal online. That is a matter of great concern. Offline, we would not allow young children access to the sort of images that they can access online, and that is of great concern.

Some people will try to portray this as a debate about censorship. We know what censorship means; it happens in certain countries, where there is the total blocking of social networking and references to the Dalai Lama, and a ban on certain political viewpoints. We are not talking about that.

Various American states have brought in legislation on the issue, including, in some cases, state-mandated internet filtering on various computers. Certain states have passed laws against digital harassment. The state of Illinois has criminalised electronic harassment outside the school setting. That is interesting, and it is important that we learn from those experiences.

I was heartened by what the Minister said when my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) brought up the issue of closing the loophole regarding rape pornography websites. It has been illegal to publish portrayals of rape in the UK since 1959, but such material is legally available to download online if it comes from foreign websites. I am heartened by what the Minister said; I think I detect a certain softening of what the Ministry of Justice has previously said on that, and I hope that the Government take the views of many individuals and groups into consideration.

The Minister and other Members have spoken at length about the excellent work of CEOP. Figures provided by CEOP show that only one in every 15 people caught viewing child pornography on the internet is arrested. The NSPCC has said that when agencies such as CEOP track down people viewing pictures of child abuse, they should

“feel the full force of the law”,

making the point that it was shocked by the figures and calling on police chiefs to take the issue more seriously because of the strong link between viewing child porn and attacks on youngsters. As a spokeswoman for YoungMinds, a charity committed to improving the emotional well-being and mental health of children and young people said, the link between viewing child pornography and the sexual abuse of children means that

“thousands are at risk of serious harm”.

That is an important point highlighting the need to arrest more of the people involved.

In 2008, for the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, Professor Tanya Byron stressed the importance of building children’s resilience; for example, teaching them not to give out contact details online. I, too, was disappointed that we did not have the debate on relationship education yesterday and I hope it will come back in another format.

Finally, many of us have been interested in the debate taking place on Facebook where to some extent we are seeing citizen power, with people contacting the advertisers of various sites and stating that they will not buy their products unless they put pressure on certain social networking sites to take down, for example, jokes relating to rape. We all know that we cannot totally police the internet but it is important that we try to do that in diverse ways, and that we come together as a House to do so. This is not an issue about social liberals or social conservatives. I am quite happy to say that I am a social conservative inside the Labour party, although my more socially liberal friends are not always pleased about that. It is important that the issue brings us together and that we continue to work on it because, as we saw in the case of April Jones, in its most extreme form its consequences are truly devastating.