My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, not least because she became a dissenting voice, and I was dreading that I might be the only one.
First, I think it important that we establish that those of us who have spent decades fighting violence against women and girls are not complacent about it. The question is whether the physical violence we describe in the Bill is the same as the abuse being described in the amendments. I worry about conflating online incivility, abuse and vile things said with physical violence, as is sometimes done.
I note that Refuge, an organisation I have a great deal of respect for, suggested that the user empowerment duties that opted to place the burden on women users to filter out their own online experience was the same as asking women to take control of their own safety and protect themselves offline from violence. I thought
that was unfair, because user empowerment duties and deciding what you filter out can be women using their agency.
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In that context, I wanted to probe Amendment 104, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, and whether affording, as it states, a higher standard of protection to women and girls could actually be disempowering. I am always concerned about discriminatory special treatment for women. I worry that we end up presenting or describing young women as particularly vulnerable due to their sex, overemphasising victimhood. That, in and of itself, can undermine women’s confidence rather than encouraging them to see themselves as strong, resilient and so on. I was especially worried about Amendment 171, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, but she is not here to move it. It states that content that promotes or perpetuates violence against women and girls should be removed, and the users removed if they are identified as creating or even disseminating it.
What always worries me about this is Bill that, because we want to improve the world—I know that is the joint enterprise here—we could get carried away. Whereas in law we have a very narrow definition of what incitement to violence is, here we are not very specific about it. I worry about the low threshold whereby somebody who creates a horrible sexist meme will be punished, but then someone who just retweets it will be treated in the same way. I want to be able to have a conversation about why that is the wrong thing to do. I am worried, as I always am, about censorship and so on.
The statistics are a bit confusing on this. There are often-repeated statistics, but you need to dig down, look at academic papers and talk to people who work in this field. An academic paper from Oxford Internet Surveys from August 2021 notes that the exceptional prevalence of online hostility to women is largely based on anecdotal experience, and that a closer look across the British population, contrary to conventional wisdom, shows that women are not necessarily more likely than men to experience hateful speech online. It also notes, however, that there is empirical evidence to show that subgroups of women—it cites journalists and politicians—can be disproportionately targeted. I will not go through all the statistics, although I do have them here, but there were very small differences of 2% or 3%, and in some instances young men were more likely to suffer abuse.
Ofcom’s Online Nation report of June 2022 says that women are more negatively affected by trolling and so on, but again, I worry about the gender point. I am worried that what we are trying to tackle here is what we all know to be a toxic and nasty political atmosphere in society that is reflected online. We all know what we are talking about. People bandy around the most vile labels; we see that regularly on social media, and, if you are a woman, it does take on this nasty, sexist side. It is incredibly unpleasant.
We also have to recognise that that is a broad, moral, social and cultural problem, which I hope that we will try to counter. I am no men’s rights sympathiser by any stretch, but I also noticed that the Ofcom
report said that young men are more likely than women to have experienced seeing potentially harmful behaviour or content online in the four weeks before the survey response—64% of men as against 60% of women. Threats of physical violence were more prevalent with boys than women—16% versus 11%—while sexual violence was the other way around. So I want us to have a sense of proportion and say that no one on the receiving end of this harmful, nasty trolling should be ignored, regardless of their sex.
It is also interesting—I will finish with this—that UK women are avid users of social media platforms, spending more than a quarter of their waking hours online and around half an hour more than men each day. We say that the online world is inhospitable to women, but there are a lot of them on it regardless, so we need a sense of perspective. Ofcom’s report makes the point that, often,
“the benefits of being online outweigh the risks”.
More women than men disagree with that; 63% agree with it compared with 71% of males. But we need a sense of perspective here because, actually, the majority of young men and women like being online. Sometimes it can give young women a sense of solidarity and sisterhood. All the surveys that I have read say that female participants feel less able to share their opinions and use their voice online, and we have to ask why.
The majority of young people who I work with are women. They say the reason they dare not speak online is not misogynist hate speech but cancel culture. They are walking on eggshells, as there are so many things that you are not allowed to say. Your Lordships will also be aware that, in gender-critical circles, for example, a lot of misogynistic hate speech is directed at women who are not toeing the line on a particular orthodoxy today. I do not want a remedy for that toxicity, with women not being sure if they can speak out because of cancel culture, if that remedy introduces more censorious trends.