Hansard

I thank Stewart Maxwell for bringing this topical debate to the chamber. I have been looking at the consequences for a long time.

I welcome the conversation around classification. Classification has been long overdue, not only in the movie industry but in the games industry, as Graeme Pearson said. As the mother of two sons, I have always been a bit alarmed at the content of some of the games and music videos to which my sons were exposed, which seemed to normalise as aspects of everyday life things that should not be normalised.

I will touch on a topic that I have spoken about in the chamber a few times: the consequences of our amazing ability to access anything that we want, anytime, anyplace, anywhere, via 3G or 4G or a wi-fi connection. The ability to do that is valuable in opening up the world to our young people and giving them insights into so many things. However, there is a dark side to it, too—the technology can be used against young people, who can be exposed to things that are alarming and frightening and which normalise perhaps abnormal and scary behaviour. I want to talk about such consequences in the debate.

At a very early stage of the debate, I raised in the chamber the issues of revenge porn, the sharing of intimate images, the objectification of women and the use of such imagery to normalise a pattern of behaviour that makes people think that it is okay to get involved in such things.

The issue for me is that the sharing of images can lead to young people being groomed online, or being bullied into sharing intimate images of themselves that are then used on shaming sites. Some of those sites have such derogatory names that I will not repeat them in the chamber, because they do not merit the attention—“shaming sites” is a catch-all term.

For some young people, that has led to serious self-harm or attempted suicide. In some well-documented cases, it has led to the suicide of young people who have been shamed so much by the sharing of intimate images across all platforms, whether on the internet or on social media.

I will focus my final remarks on the responsibility that internet and social media providers bear to some extent for such consequences. I know of many young people who have found it very difficult to have comments, mocked-up photographs or actual photographs and images of themselves removed from internet sites. The internet provider that they use in this country may be registered in another country and may therefore fall under a different jurisdiction. In that regard, there is an issue with the use of international law to protect our children. That is a real worry for me, and it must be looked at seriously. Internet and social media providers should take a leaf out of the BBFC’s book; they should look at the work that it is doing and consider taking forward some of its ideas.

The time has come when we need much stronger policies in this area, not only for the young people who access such information and use it to bully or shame, or who receive information that causes them desperate alarm, but for us as parents or as members of the community. How can we put pressure on organisations to ensure that when our young people go into the amazing world of online media, with all the benefits that that brings them, they are not exposed to some of the dark, scary stuff that is in there? How can we ensure that if they are exposed to it, they are able to handle it? As the parents and adults in young people’s lives, we must be equipped with information to ensure that we can support them when they have that type of experience.

The debate has been a long time coming, but we should not stop debating the issues. Technology moves on at a great speed, and we must be fleet of foot and move at that speed too. I would be keen to hear views on that.

Finally, the European Union is looking at taking action on a Europe-wide basis, and we should keep a weather eye on what is happening there. If we can take action across boundaries and borders, we will remove the problem of internet providers being registered in a different country, which enables them to say, “It’s not our problem—it’s a different jurisdiction.” That is the direction in which I would like to go on the matter. I thank Stewart Maxwell for bringing the debate to the chamber. We should continue to focus on the issue.