My Lords, it is a great pleasure to move Amendment 97 and speak to Amendment 304, both standing in my name and supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth. I am very grateful for their support. I look forward to hearing the arguments by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for Amendment 104 as well, which run in a similar vein.
These amendments are also supported by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, the Revenge Porn Helpline, BT, EE and more than 100,000 UK citizens who have signed End Violence Against Women’s petition urging the Government to better protect women and girls in the Bill.
I am also very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Foster of Aghadrumsee—I know I pronounced that incorrectly—the very distinguished former Northern Ireland politician. She cannot be here to speak today in favour of the amendment but asked me to put on record her support for it.
I also offer my gratitude to the End Violence Against Women Coalition, Glitch, Refuge, Carnegie UK, NSPCC, 5Rights, Professor Clare McGlynn and Professor Lorna Woods. Between them all, they created the draft violence against women and girls code of practice many months ago, proving that a VAWG code of practice is not only necessary but absolutely deliverable.
Much has already been said on this, both here and outside the Chamber. In the time available, I will focus my case for these amendments on two very specific points. The first is why VAWG, violence against women and girls, should have a specific code of practice legislated for it, rather than other content we might debate. The second is what having a code of practice means in relation to the management of that content.
Ofcom has already published masses of research showing that abuse online is gendered. The Government’s own fact sheet, sent to us before these debates, said that women and girls experience disproportionate levels of abuse online. They experience a vast array of abuse online because of their gender, including cyberflashing, harassment, rape threats and stalking. As we have already heard and will continue to hear in these debates, some of those offences and abuse reach a criminal threshold and some do not. That is at the heart of this debate.
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The first death threat that I received—I have received a number, sadly, both to me and to my family—did not talk about death or dying. It said that I was going
to be “Jo Coxed”. Of course, I reported that to Twitter and the AI content moderator. Because it did not have those words in it, it was not deemed to be a threat. It was not until I could speak to a human being—in this case, the UK public affairs manager of Twitter, to whom I am very grateful—that it even started to be taken seriously.
The fear of being harassed is impacting women’s freedom of speech. The Fawcett Society has found that 73% of female MPs, versus 51% of male MPs, say that they avoid speaking online in certain discussions because of fear of the consequences of doing so. Other women in the public eye, such as the presenter Karen Carney, have also been driven offline due to gendered abuse.
Here is the thing I cannot reconcile with the government response on this so far. This Government have absolutely rightly recognised that violence against women and girls is a national threat. They have made it a part of the strategic policing requirement. If tackling online abuse against women and girls is a priority, as the Government say, and if, as in the stated manifesto commitment of 2019, they want the UK to be
“the safest place in the world to be online”,
why are the words “women and girls” not used once in the 262 pages of the current draft of the Bill?
The Minister has said that changes have been made in the other House on the Bill—I understand that—and that it is now focused more on the protection of children in relation to certain content, whereas adults are deemed to be able to choose more what they see and how they see it. But there is a G in VAWG, for girls. The code of practice that we are talking about would benefit that very group of people—young girls, who are children—whom the Government have said that they really want to protect through the Bill.
Online harassment does not affect only women in the public eye but all women. I suspect that we all now know the statistic that women are 27 times more likely to be harassed online than men. In other words, to have an online presence as a woman is to expect harassment. That is not to say that men do not face abuse online, but a lot of the online abuse is deliberately gendered and is targeted at women. Do men receive rape threats on the same vast scale as women and young girls?
It should not be the public’s job to force a platform to act on the harmful content that it is hosting, just as it should not be a woman’s job to limit her online presence to prevent harassment. But the sad reality is that, in its current form, the Bill is doing very little to force platforms to act holistically in relation to violence against women and girls and to change their culture online.
The new VAWG-relevant criminal offences listed in the Bill—I know that my noble friend the Minister will rely on these in his response to the debate—including cyberflashing and coercive and controlling behaviour, are an important step, but even these new offences have their own issues, which I suspect we will come on to debate in the next day of Committee: for example, cyberflashing being motive-based instead of consent-based. Requiring only those platforms caught by the Bill to look at the criminal offences individually ignores the rest of the spectrum of gendered abuse.
Likewise, the gender-neutral approach in the Bill will harm children. NSPCC research found that in 2021-22, four in five victims of online grooming offences were girls. The Internet Watch Foundation, an organisation we are going to talk about in the next group, has found in recently published statistics that girls are more likely to be seriously abused online. I have already stated that this is not to say that boys and men do not experience abuse online, but the fact is that women and girls are several times more likely to be abused. This is not an argument against free speech; people online should be allowed to debate and disagree with each other, but discussions can and should be had without the threat of rape or harassment.
Again, the Government will argue that the triple-shield approach to combating legal but harmful content online will sufficiently protect women and girls, but this is not the case. Instead of removing this content, the Bill’s user empowerment tools—much debated already—expect women to shield themselves from seeing it. All this does is allow misogynistic and often violent conversations to continue without women knowing about them, the result of which can be extremely dangerous. A victim of domestic abuse could indeed block the user threatening to kill them, but that does not stop that user from continuing to post the threats he is making, or even posting photos of the victim’s front door. Instead of protecting the victim, these tools potentially leave them even more vulnerable to real-life harms. Likewise, the triple shield will rely too heavily on platforms setting their own terms and conditions. We have just heard my noble friend the Minister using this argument in the last group, but the issue is that the platforms can choose to water down their terms and conditions, and Ofcom is then left without recourse.
I turn to what a violence against women and girls code of practice would mean. It could greatly reduce all the dangers I have just laid out. It would ensure that services regularly review their algorithms to stop misogyny going viral, and that moderators are taught, for example, how to recognise different forms of online violence against women and girls, including forms of tech abuse. Ofcom has described codes of practice as
“key documents, which set out the steps services can take to comply with their duties”.
Services can choose to take an alternative approach to complying with their duties, provided that it is consistent with the duties in the Bill, but codes will provide a clear route to compliance, and Ofcom envisages that many services will therefore take advantage of them.
The value of having a code lies in its systemic approach. It does not focus on individual items of content—which is one of the worries that have been expressed, both in this House and outside—but it focuses the platforms’ minds on the whole environment in which the tech-enabled abuse occurs. The code of practice would make the UK the first country in the world to hold tech companies specifically to account on tackling violence against women and girls. It would also make the Online Safety Bill more future-proof, because it would provide a proactive and agile route for identifying and problem-solving new forms of online VAWG as they emerge, rather than delaying
action until the creation of a new criminal offence when the next relevant piece of primary legislation comes along.
I finish by saying that throughout the Bill’s journey through Parliament, we have debated whether it sufficiently protects women and girls. The objective answer is, “No, it does not”, but there appears to be a real reluctance to accept this as fact. Instead of just agreeing to disagree on this topic, we instead have an opportunity here to protect millions of women and girls online with a violence against women and girls code of practice. So I ask noble Lords to support this critical amendment, not just for the sake of themselves, their daughters, their sisters or their wives but for the sake of the millions of women whose names we will never know but who will be grateful that we stood on their side on the issue of gendered online violence. I beg to move.