Tackling Image-based Abuse

Victoria Collins Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Davies-Jones)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) for securing a debate on this very important subject. I look forward to discussing it with her and other members of the Women and Equalities Committee later this month.

This Government are absolutely committed to tackling violence against women and girls, and to restoring trust so that victims know that the justice system sees them, hears them and takes them seriously. In our election manifesto, we promised to make tackling violence against women and girls a political priority—finally, after years of neglect—with a pledge to halve violence against women and girls over the next decade. It is an ambitious target, but I believe we can do it.

Tackling online abuse is crucial. As outlined so eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton North East, the statistics are clear, but behind them are real people—real victims. Many of us will have experienced it ourselves, or know friends or family who have. Women have the right to feel safe in every space, online and offline. The rise in intimate image abuse is utterly devastating for victims, but it also spreads misogyny on social media, which can develop into potentially dangerous relationships offline. It is truly an abhorrent crime, which is why the Government are determined to act. It will not be easy and we are just at the start, but we will use all the tools available to us to tackle it.

Let me set out some of the work we are doing right now. First, it is vital that our criminal law is equipped to deal effectively with this behaviour. A range of criminal offences tackle intimate image abuse, whether online or offline. That includes offences of voyeurism and sharing or threatening to share intimate images without consent. However, the current law has developed in piecemeal fashion, with new offences introduced over many years to address different forms of offending. The result is a patchwork of offences with known gaps in protection for victims. For example, while it is currently an offence to share a deepfake of an intimate image without consent, it is not an offence to make one. That is why the Government’s manifesto included a commitment to ban the creation of degrading and harmful sexually explicit deepfakes. This is not porn; this is abuse. We are looking at options to swiftly deliver that commitment in this Session of Parliament. We will consider what further legislative measures may be needed to strengthen the law in this area.

While intimate image abuse rightly has serious criminal consequences, we also need to tackle the prevalence of such content online. That is why, on 12 September, we laid before the House a statutory instrument to add the new criminal offences of sharing or threatening to share intimate images to the list of priority offences under the Online Safety Act. This strengthens the duties on providers to prioritise tackling intimate image abuse under the Act by holding them responsible for stopping the spread.

[Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)]

Strengthening those duties is key. As the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) mentioned, Ofcom does not have the teeth it needs. Would the Minister agree that Ofcom needs to use its codes of practice to push social media companies to be more innovative to tackle the issue at the source?