Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she has made of the potential impact of social media on perpetuating violence against women and girls.

Tackling violence against women and girls (VAWG) in all of its forms, including when it takes place online, is a top priority for this Government. Our upcoming VAWG Strategy will set out the strategic direction and concrete actions to deliver our unprecedented ambition to halve VAWG in a decade.

In addition, the Online Safety Act 2023 requires all in-scope companies, including social media platforms, to take swift and effective action against criminal online abuse. However, social media companies must still do more to protect women and girls. The Secretary of State for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has laid before Parliament the Government’s draft Statement of Strategic Priorities for Online Safety, which aim to ensure the Online Safety Act delivers improved online safety outcomes. This includes how the Act will deliver on tackling illegal and misogynistic content to ensure increased safety online for women and girls.

We are also taking action on non-consensual intimate image abuse. The Online Safety Act inserted new offences of sharing or threatening to share intimate images into the Sexual Offences Act 2003. These new offences apply to a broader category of image and in a wider array of circumstances than the previous offences. We are going further by introducing offences of taking an intimate image without consent or reasonable belief in consent and installing equipment with the intent to take intimate images without consent or reasonable belief in consent, via the Crime and Policing Bill. We are also introducing new offences to create or request the creation of intimate images without consent or reasonable belief in consent, via the Data (Use and Access) Bill. This will criminalise the creation of deepfake intimate images without consent.

Our efforts to tackle VAWG and child sexual abuse needs to evolve to meet changes in social media and technology head on. As such, in the dawn of an increase in AI- generated child sexual abuse (CSA), we are taking forward several measures through the Crime and Policing Bill to better safeguard children and young people at risk of sexual abuse. These measures are:

• CSA image generators - This offence will criminalise AI models that have been optimised to create the most severe forms of child sexual abuse material.
• AI paedophile manuals - This measure will ensure that offenders in possession of AI paedophile manuals – which provide guidance about using AI to abuse children sexually – will be criminalised.
• Moderators and administrators of CSA sites – A specific criminal offence targeting offenders who run sites dedicated to child sexual abuse. On these sites, offenders share child sexual abuse material (CSAM) content, or advice on how to groom children.
• CSAM at the Border - This measure will give Border Force officers the power to compel individuals reasonably suspected of posing a sexual risk to children to unlock their digital devices for inspection.

This Government is committed to tackling VAWG and CSAM and will remain agile to the threats and act accordingly.