My Lords, as usual, the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, has explained with some nuance the trickiness of this area, which at first sight appears obvious—black and white—but is not quite that. I want to explore some of these things.
Many decades ago, I ran a drop-in centre for the recovering mentally ill. I remember my shock the first time that I came across a group of young women who had completely cut themselves up. It was a world that I did not know but, at that time, a very small world—a very minor but serious problem in society. Decades later, going around doing lots of talks, particularly in girls’ schools where I am invited to speak, I suddenly discovered that whole swathes of young women were
doing something that had been considered a mental health problem, often hidden away. Suddenly, people were talking about a social contagion of self-harm happening in the school. Similarly, there were discussions about eating disorders being not just an individual mental health problem but something that kind of grew within a group.
Now we have the situation with suicide sites, which are phenomenal at exploiting those vulnerabilities. This is undoubtedly a social problem of some magnitude. I do not in any way want to minimise it, but I am not sure exactly how legislation can resolve it or whether it will, even though I agree that it could do certain things.
Some of the problems that we have, which have already been alluded to, really came home to me when I read about Instagram bringing in some rules on self-harm material, which ended up with the removal of posts by survivors of self-harm discussing their illness. I read a story in the Coventry Evening Telegraph—I was always interested because I ran the drop-in centre for the recovering mentally ill in Coventry—where a young woman had some photographs taken down from Instagram because they contained self-harm images of her scars. The young woman who had suffered these problems, Marie from Tile Hill, wanted to share pictures of her scars with other young people because she felt that they would help others recover. She had got over it and was basically saying that the scars were healing. In other words, it was a kind of self-help group for users online, yet it was taken down.
It is my usual problem: this looks to be a clear-cut case, yet the complexities can lead to problems of censorship of a sort. I was really pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, stressed the point about definitions. Search engines such as Google have certainly raised the problem of a concern, or worry, that people looking for help—or even looking to write an essay on suicide, assisted suicide or whatever—will end up not being able to find appropriate material.
I also want to ask a slightly different question. Who decides which self-harms are in our definitions and what is the contagion? When I visit schools now, there is a new social contagion in town, I am afraid to say, which is that of gender dysphoria. In the polling for a newly published report Show, Tell and Leave Nothing to the Imagination by Jo-Anne Nadler, which has just come out, half of the young people interviewed said that they knew someone at their school who wanted to change gender or had already, while one in 10 said that they wanted to change their gender.
That is just an observation; your Lordships might ask what it has to do with the Bill. But these are actually problem areas that are being affirmed by educational organisations and charities, by which I mean that organisations that have often worked with government have been consulted as stakeholders. They have recommended to young women where online to purchase chest binders, which will stop them developing, or where and how to use puberty blockers. Eventually, they are affirming double mastectomies or castration. By the way, this is of course all over social media, because once you start to search on it, TikTok is rife with it. Algorithmically, we are reminded all the time to think about systems: once you have had a look at it, it is everywhere. My point is that this is affirmed socially.
Imagine a situation whereby, in society offline, some young woman who has an eating disorder and weighs 4 stone comes to you and says “Look, I’m so fat”. If you said, “Yes, of course you’re fat—I’ll help you slim”, we would think it was terrible. When that happens online, crudely and sometimes cruelly, we want to tackle it here. If some young woman came to you and said, “I want to self-harm; I feel so miserable that I want to cut myself”, and you started recommending blades, we would think it was atrocious behaviour. In some ways, that is what is happening online and that is where I have every sympathy with these amendments. Yet when it comes to gender dysphoria, which actually means encouraging self-harm, because it is a cultural phenomenon that is popular it does not count.
In some ways, I could be arguing that we should future-proof this legislation by including those self-harms in the definition put forward by the amendments in this group. However, I raise it more to indicate that, as with all definitions, it is not quite as easy as one would think. I appreciate that a number of noble Lords, and others engaged in this discussion, might think that I am merely exhibiting prejudice rather than any genuine compassion or concern for those young people. I would note that if noble Lords want to see a rising group of people who are suicidal and feel that their life is really not worth living, search out the work being done on detransitioners who realise too late that that affirmation by adults has been a disaster for them.
On the amendments suggesting another advisory committee with experts to advise Ofcom on how we regulate such harms, I ask that we are at least cautious about which experts. To mention one of the expert bodies, Mermaids has become controversial and has actually been advocating some of those self-harms, in my opinion. It is now subject to a Charity Commission investigation but has been on bodies such as this advising about young people. I would not think that appropriate, so I just ask that some consideration is given to which experts would be on such bodies.
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