My Lords, I am pleased to add my name to Amendment 271, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, has spoken so comprehensively. I too heard the criticisms made by the Minister, but they do not take away from the intention behind that amendment, which is really important. Like others, I hope to convey the well wishes from around the House to the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone. I am grateful the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, for introducing this whole section with a great deal of clarity.
I will not repeat what has been said about the traumas involved, because that has been covered. It seems that one of the real difficulties is how people in receipt of these ghastly images and experiences can report them and get something done.
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A study from UCL and the University of Kent in 2021 found that 51% of people who had received unwanted sexual content without their consent did nothing about reporting it and one-third of people thought that reporting did not work anyway; there was no point, and it would add to their own trauma. The other difficulty with reporting, which I do not think has been touched on yet, is that some of the perpetrators of cyberflashing do so with false identities. They are nearly all men who take on false identities, so tracing them is particularly difficult.
In listening to the debate, I welcome the government amendment, because, like others have said, coercive and controlling behaviour has been very poorly understood across the whole of society until very recently. It is to the credit of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, that awareness has risen. People have seen what has been happening in front of their own eyes, but they never noticed it previously.
It seems that this difficulty, again, goes back to the debate we had previously on the need for some form of complaints system, whereby people can report easily to a complaints system and have confidence in that complaint being collated with other similar complaints, which would then allow action to be taken.