My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 177A in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Alton and Lord McColl, and the noble Baroness, Lady Healy. This amendment would require the Secretary of State to commission a person to investigate the impact of access to online pornography by children on domestic abuse. It further requires that the appointed person must publish a report on the investigation and that, if they recommend that Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 should be implemented, the Secretary of State must appoint a day for that part coming into force, under Section 118(6) of that Act.
Some may ask why this amendment is central to the Domestic Abuse Bill. During its passage through the other place, the Bill was amended to embrace what is now Clause 65, which very properly removes the defence of consent in cases of rough sex when someone suffers serious injury or death. Embracing this provision, the Bill before the Committee rightly makes it plain that sexual violence is part of domestic abuse. One of the striking things about the debate in the other place that gave rise to Clause 65 is that it was informed by material that made it plain that there is a connection between an interest in experimenting with rough sex practices and the prior consumption of pornography depicting such practices.
Louise Perry of We Can’t Consent to This, the key group that campaigned for Clause 65, said:
“We can’t really ignore the porn factor … It’s there at a click of a button and can be accessed at such a young age. And the algorithms push you into a rabbit hole of more and more extreme stuff.”
The argument for Clause 65 was also informed by Savanta ComRes, which polled 2,049 men in Great Britain between 7 and 10 February last year for Radio 5 Live and BBC Radio Scotland. The polling asked the following question:
“Thinking specifically of times you performed slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sexual activity, to what extent do you think pornography influenced your desire to do so?”
The answers were striking: 57% of those questioned said that it did, of whom 20% said that it influenced them “a great deal”.
I am very pleased that the other place amended the Bill to insert Clause 65, which addresses problems resulting from rough sex practices. However, to date, Parliament has only followed through on the logic of Clause 65 taking rough sex seriously at the level of dealing with the consequences of this form of domestic violence. We have not exhibited the same level of concern in relation to the steps that can be taken to prevent this form of sexual violence in the first place.
We need joined-up thinking here. We need action to prevent injury or death through rough sex, as well as criminal justice measures to ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice. One of the most basic strategies of prevention in that regard is to protect under-18s from material that normalises the expectation of violence in sexual relationships. Taking the step proposed in the amendment would constitute strategic investment in the next generation to ensure that as children enter adulthood, they do not do so believing that violence is a natural part of sexual relationships, with all that that means for their adult behaviour.
The irony, of course, is that Parliament has passed legislation that protects under-18s from such material on commercial pornographic websites, but the Government have refused to implement it. Had the Government implemented Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 in 2019, under-18s would now be protected from exposure to pornographic content on pornographic websites, including significant rough-sex material. An interviewee said in a recent government report: “On ‘Pornhub’ you don’t have to look in the rough sex category to get rough sex. They’re just standard videos of men having sex with women by grabbing them by the throat”.
Of course, when the Government announced that they were not going to implement Part 3 in October 2019, they acknowledged only one downside to that approach—that of delay. They suggested that having to wait was worth while because the forthcoming online safety Bill would provide better protection from commercial pornographic sites than Part 3. However, in December 2020, when responding to the online harms consultation, the Government conceded not only that there would be a huge delay in providing protection to under-18s—probably until 2023, possibly even later—but that the alternative means of protecting children from commercial pornographic sites would
also be much weaker. In the first instance, the Government confirmed that, unlike Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, the protections afforded under the online harms Bill would engage only with user-generated, not non-user generated, content. In the second instance, the detail that the Government provided about enforcement did not provide the reassurance required.
Noble Lords will recall that when Parliament scrutinised the Digital Economy Act, the point was made that of the 50 most accessible pornographic websites in the UK, none were based in the UK. Consequently, the only way to gain leverage over the sites in other jurisdictions in relation to enforcing age-verification blocks would be through IP blocking. A site accessing the UK market from Russia without robust age-verification checks would be told by the regulator to put those checks in place within a certain timeframe or risk being blocked. The site would then have to decide either to put in place those robust checks or lose significant UK revenue as a result of blocking.
However, in responding to the online harms consultation in December last year, the Government proposed fines as the main means of enforcement and seemed to entertain IP blocking only as a last resort, which is very concerning. At Second Reading, I raised those concerns, along with the noble Lords, Lord Alton, Lord McColl and Lord Morrow, and the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. Since that debate, the Government have taken two steps that only amplify the difficulty. First, on 26 January, the noble Baroness the Minister wrote to Peers to address the points we made in relation to pornography at Second Reading. However, rather than addressing the presenting problem, the letter simply repeats it and makes it plain that unlike the Digital Economy Act, the online harms Bill will only engage pornographic sites that
“host user generated content or facilitate online user interaction”.
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I am fully aware that the online harms Bill will have a much wider focus than the Digital Economy Act, engaging pornography on social media as well as online harms that have nothing to do with pornography. I lobbied for this and welcome it. However, when people like myself called on the Government to take steps to protect under-18s from pornography on social media, as well as on commercial pornographic websites, that was on the basis that the protections in relation to commercial pornographic websites should be implemented immediately—and certainly not made weaker.
Furthermore, when viewed specifically from the perspective of our domestic abuse debate today, the proposal not to focus on non-user-generated pornography content makes no sense at all because depictions of rough sex are just as likely in non-user-generated pornography as they are in user-generated pornography. Secondly, there is the Government’s response to a specific request made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, at Second Reading. In his speech, he specifically asked the Government to publish the long-awaited research that they commissioned on the impact of pornography construction on male attitudes and behaviour in response to reports produced by the Women and Equalities Committee.
On 15 January, that research was quietly published yet, despite the fact that the Minister was asked specifically about it, her letter on 26 January makes no reference to this important development. I discovered the research only by accident—I have it here. The findings are hugely important for this debate. The research demonstrates that there is now even more reason for the Government to acknowledge how accessing pornography generates the idea that violence in sexual relationships is normal, with all its behavioural consequences in adulthood.
First, literature reviewed on adult males aged 16 and over concludes that
“there is substantial evidence of an association between the use of pornography and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women … it is clear that a relationship does exist and this is especially true for the use of violent pornography.”
The report states that
“a great deal of this easy to access, mainstream pornography depicts (to varying levels) sexual violence and female degradation with the perpetrators of aggression usually male, and the targets of aggression overwhelmingly female.”
On discussions with professionals working with clients aged 16 and over who had either exhibited harmful sexual behaviours towards women or were at risk of doing so, the report states:
“The view that pornography played a role in their clients’ harmful attitudes and/or behaviours was undisputed”.
This is of huge relevance to my Amendment 177A, with its focus on under-18s, because the professionals said that, for young people, pornography is seen as providing
“a template for what sex and sexual relationships should look like.”
One stated:
“Porn comes up in probably eighty or ninety percent of my cases … what they’ve done is influenced by what they’ve seen … For them, the internet is fact.”
In order to appreciate the significance of these reports fully, it is important to revisit the consideration of the Bill in the other place. The honourable Member for Congleton tabled an amendment on the connection between pornography consumption and domestic violence and, in the course of moving it, asked the Government when their promised research on the impact of pornography consumption will be published. The Minister responded in a way that most listeners would assume suggested that the research was not ready and was therefore ongoing.
What the publication of the reports from January 2021 makes clear—as shown on the front of their covers—is that the research was actually prepared for publication by the Government Equalities Office for February 2020: a month before lockdown. This means that the Government have sat on research with significant implications for the discussion of domestic violence for nearly a year. The direct consequence of this is that MPs have been denied the opportunity to enlighten their debate on the Bill before us today with the relevant findings of the research. This was wholly unnecessary because the research was concluded before First Reading in the other place on 3 March 2020. When this failing is considered in the context of the failure of the Government’s letter to Peers to address the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, one is tempted to conclude that the Government were
hoping that no one would spot the research. I am saddened and disappointed by this. I am sure that other noble Lords will feel the same way about this discovery.
This unhappy episode certainly does not build trust. It compounds the sense that, going forward, we need answers—and quickly. But there is a way forward. In order for me not to push my amendment, I ask the Minister, for whom I have great respect, to make two central commitments to doing what I strongly believe the Government need to do. First, I ask that the provision in the online harms Bill for addressing commercial pornographic websites be as robust as those in Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act. These provisions must fully engage pornographic websites showing both non-user-generated and user-generated pornography, and provide enforcement mechanisms through IP blocking that are as robust and accessible as those in Part 3. Secondly, given that the online harms Bill still has not been published and there is very little chance that it will protect children from exposure to online pornography —including pornography depicting rough sex acts—for at least another two years and probably more, I ask the Government now to implement Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act as an interim measure to protect our children in the long term. As I always say, childhood lasts a lifetime. I beg to move.