Meeting of the Parliament 21 September 2023
I thank the Criminal Justice Committee for its work on this important issue, and for this afternoon’s debate. I also extend thanks to those from the third sector and statutory agencies who gave evidence with such care and sensitivity.
I refer colleagues to my entry in the register of members’ interests. I previously worked for a rape crisis centre, and in that capacity I managed the prevention project that involves workers going into some schools to speak to young people about relationships, consent, sexual violence, safety and so much more. Such education and awareness-raising programmes are so important, as has already been highlighted by many others this afternoon.
I will focus my remarks on just a few of the important points that were raised during the committee’s evidence sessions. First, and perhaps most importantly, we must never lose sight of the fact that we are talking about actual harm to actual children. What matters is preventing and intervening to end that harm, and also helping children to recover from their pain, trauma and distress.
Expressing revulsion and talking tough may make us feel better, but they do not always help anyone else. For example, zero-tolerance policies on sharing self-created images can make it much more difficult for worried children to express their concerns.
If tough legislation is not always the answer for young people and their mistakes, it is a different matter when it comes to wealthy corporations and those who profit from them. The committee heard very clearly how important it is to make senior managers in technology companies responsible for failures to protect children on their platforms. The committee learned of the striking parallel with the construction industry, where introducing such responsibility has been transformational in saving lives and preventing serious injury. We cannot yet tell whether the UK Government’s long-delayed Online Safety Bill, which was finally passed this week, will have the impact that it needs to have.
This is a moral issue, but not in a prudish or puritanical sense. It was interesting to hear that adult entertainment sites are often the most proactive in working to protect children, while mainstream social media—notably Snapchat and the service formerly known as Twitter—have been much more reluctant to engage.
Online abuse does not exist in a vacuum. The distinction between virtual and physical worlds that older generations make is not experienced by children and young people, as others have highlighted. That is why retaining a hierarchy in which contact offences are more serious than online offences can be unhelpful, as that fails to recognise the ways in which profound harm can be caused without physical presence. Issues of online safety, trafficking and child criminal exploitation all need to be addressed together, rather than being confined to separate silos.
Those interconnections affect how we view and treat children who cause harm to others but whose behaviour may often be the consequence of their own traumatic experiences. They, too, need care and support as well as to have their own offending addressed. The committee heard that Westminster’s strategy barely recognises that—a failure that is now compounded by Westminster’s abdication of all responsibility for trafficked asylum-seeking children.
We can and must do better here. That includes acknowledging the reality of how much child abuse takes place at home, within families, where children should be safest and most secure. We cannot allow culture war rhetoric to rob children and young people of the support and help that they need. The noisy clamour against confidentiality for children’s gender identity is dangerous in its transphobic tendencies but also in how it potentially undermines the safety of home—a vital space. Children and young people must be able to talk to responsible professionals about their lives with the assurance that information will not be shared with possibly abusive family members.
Professionals such as teachers and social workers need the capacity, space, time and experience really to listen and really to hear. Sexual abuse is often much harder for children to disclose than other forms of violence or emotional abuse. The committee heard that it can be difficult to overcome the assumption that abuse simply does not happen in nice middle-class families.
Finally, against the backdrop of our continued work to incorporate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, we need to remember that this is not only an issue of care and responsibility and a criminal justice matter but a public health problem and a human rights question. Children and young people need not only protection but recognition, trust and age-appropriate agency and autonomy. They are the experts in such harm and in its rapidly changing context.
As many of the expert witnesses testified, children and young people are often best placed to advise lawmakers and support one another. Perhaps our role is to listen to children and young people more, to amplify their informed voices and to join them in calling the powerful—in Governments and corporations—to urgent and effective account. I wish the committee well in its on-going work to that end.
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