Children: Online Grooming

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Benjamin]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to protect children online who have been groomed into filming their own abuse.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and declare an interest as a champion of the Internet Watch Foundation and a vice-president of Barnardo’s.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, the rise in self-generated indecent images of children is extremely concerning. These images can have devastating impacts on young people, putting them at risk of blackmail, coercion and, of course, further abuse. Through the online harms Bill we intend to publish a new duty of care for online companies towards their users, overseen by an independent regulator. Our response during the pandemic includes amplifying messages to stakeholders to help children to stay safe online.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, professionals working in child protection, such as those at Barnardo’s and the NSPCC, have been raising concerns about the impact of the lockdown on children, which has created a perfect storm that has led to an increase in online child abuse. The Internet Watch Foundation has warned of a rise in self-generated illegal images of young children which it has had to take down, up almost 50% on last year. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that there is a renewed focus on prevention and the protection of children, who are spending more time online, to guarantee that they are properly supported with high-quality online safety advice, funding and resources?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I agree whole- heartedly with the noble Baroness: she is absolutely right that the figures she quotes are staggering and worrying. I commend the Internet Watch Foundation for the work it is doing. I know that officials are engaging very closely with the IWF to explore what more we can do to tackle this sort of online grooming. I also know that RSE in schools is another area through which we can engage with children to prevent this sort of thing happening in the first place.

Domestic Abuse

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

The noble Baroness asks a very pertinent question in this field. The Government have put in place several forms of protection for victims to prevent continued coercive control, which so often goes on after the event, and economic abuse, including accommodation, community-based services and counselling. The Domestic Abuse Bill and wider action plan will help to ensure that victims have the confidence to come forward and report their experiences, safe in the knowledge that the justice system and other agencies will do everything they can to protect and support them and their children and pursue their abuser.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD) [V]]

My Lords, recent shocking evidence showed a 20% rise in babies being killed or harmed at home during the first lockdown. In normal times, 50% of children in need of support from local authorities come from homes with domestic abuse. The Domestic Abuse Bill promises additional support for victims and children in safe accommodation, but this will not help those who do not or cannot flee their own homes. Will the Minister tell us how the Bill will improve support for victims and their children while they live in an abusive family home?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that I have outlined some of the measures that we intend to put in place. The noble Baroness will recall, some time ago when we discussed this, I explained how we will support people through local authorities in their own homes who need to be kept safe for a short period of time through safe rooms, et cetera. However, the whole point of the provisions of the Domestic Abuse Bill is to deal with all the things that she outlines, including supporting women who have suffered abuse and their children, and establishing perpetrator programmes, which are so often overlooked but are at the heart of us tackling this awful crime.

Windrush Compensation Scheme

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Baroness for making that point. We have got to get a balance on streamlining the process on often quite complicated situations. Yesterday my right honourable friend the Home Secretary invited Members of the House of Commons to see some of the casework that is going on to demonstrate how absolutely thoroughly we are considering and processing these claims. There is a balance to be struck between making sure that everyone gets the full amount to which they are entitled and doing it in a timely fashion. I do not disagree with the noble Baroness in part, but we need to do it thoroughly and properly and ensure that everyone gets the full amount to which they are entitled.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Windrush Commemoration Committee. For more than 40 years I have been striving for true racial equality, and I have sat on many panels and committees to address the issue—but to little avail. There are hundreds of recommendations in existing reviews; it is exasperating. So, while I welcome the formation of the Windrush cross-government committee and the promise to implement all Wendy Williams’s recommendations, if the Government are truly serious about tackling systemic racial inequality, the time has come to establish a far wider-ranging, effective and comprehensive race equality strategy. Will the Government commit to working together across government with appropriate stakeholders to implement a race equality strategy at Cabinet level?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness for all the work she has done in this area. I hope that the progress we have made on this is some comfort after seven decades of inequality being built up because of successive Governments—we all need to look to ourselves—putting in place policies that have made it more difficult for members of the Windrush generation and others to settle and make their lives here. I shall certainly take back what she said about a race equality strategy. I hope the noble Baroness is happy about the cross-government working group in the sense that it brings in a whole-of-Whitehall approach not only to look at some of the lessons that Wendy Williams wants us to look at but to tackle the problems that occur across government departments in exacerbating race inequality.

Black Lives Matter: Protests

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Monday 15th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Lord for making that point. The Wendy Williams review has to be answered in a timely fashion and my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has committed to doing so. Wendy Williams was very clear in her recommendation that she did not want the Government or the Home Secretary to rush to respond but to reflect on the very good points she had made in her review. The Prime Minister’s commission will not in any way undermine the work that the Home Office is doing. The noble Lord talked about the review being on my desk. It is not on my desk, but we all share responsibility for it.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD) [V]]

My Lords, monuments are intended to commemorate important and significant events in our history. Black history needs to be addressed. I am proud to chair the Windrush Commemoration Committee, which, under the auspices of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, will unveil in 2022 a Windrush monument at Waterloo station, where thousands of Caribbeans arrived. There will also be an IT educational element to it, celebrating major contributions that Caribbeans have made to Britain. This must not be a one-off, so will the Government consider commissioning more such monuments, such as a national slavery monument, to document our history and demonstrate that black lives really do matter?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I commend the noble Baroness on all that she has done in securing a Windrush Day and on the work she has done on the Windrush monument at Waterloo to commemorate those people who arrived here to rebuild this country after the war. On a national slavery monument, I do not know whether the noble Baroness knows the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool—I bet she does. I am racking my brains to remember whether there is actually a statue outside it, but positioned as it is, in the very heart of a city built in many ways on slavery, it is a reminder to us all of why black lives matter.

Child Sex Predators

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Benjamin]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to prevent 18 to 25 year-olds becoming child sex predators online.

The Question was considered in a Virtual Proceeding via video call.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and declare an interest as a champion of the Internet Watch Foundation.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, child sexual abuse is an abhorrent crime and tackling it is a key priority for the Home Office. We aim to prevent offending by halting the escalation of harmful sexual behaviour in young people. We support the Lucy Faithfull Foundation’s Stop It Now! campaign, which signposts those concerned about their behaviour towards confidential support, and the joint project by the Marie Collins Foundation and the Internet Watch Foundation to increase awareness of the law.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Benjamin]

I thank the noble Baroness for her Answer. In April, during lockdown, data from three internet companies serving the UK market and deploying the Internet Watch Foundation’s webpage blocking list identified 8.8 million attempts to access known sexual abuse imagery of innocent children. The IWF is essential in preventing internet users, especially young men, accessing—often accidentally—this type of horrific content and going on to commit sexual offences. What are the Government doing to tackle the issue of the estimated 300,000 people who currently pose a threat to children in the UK, and what steps are they taking to encourage smaller ISPs that do not deploy the list?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Baroness points towards the international response required here. We not only engage with our Five Eyes partners but employ technology for takedown of such images, as do our international partners. We engage with our police and law enforcement agencies to enable the takedown of these sorts of images. On a practical level, we work with NGOs to ensure that children are kept safe online and that some of the things they do online are safe.

Windrush Compensation Scheme

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, in 2017 I was honoured to be asked by the Government to chair the Windrush Commemoration Committee, to create a Windrush monument in recognition of the contribution that Caribbean people have made to Britain. In 2022, the monument will be erected at Waterloo station, where thousands of West Indians like myself arrived in Britain before dispersing across the whole of the UK. However, the committee is finding it hard to make this a joyful experience, because of the Windrush scandal and the shame hanging over the country. This needs to be solved urgently.

Like many West Indians, I have dedicated my life to serving this country. We were brought up in the Caribbean to believe that we were British—part of the motherland—and taught at school to celebrate British history. In 1960, I was one of the lucky children who arrived in Britain with my own passport, but the Windrush scandal has shown that it could have been so different for me had I not had one.

Life during those early years in Britain was harsh, brutal and cruel. My whole family, all eight of us, lived in one room, as there was little accommodation available for Caribbean people. I saw those signs saying, “no Irish, no dogs, no coloureds”. I had people spit at me. Grown men lifted my skirt and said, “Where’s your tail, monkey?” I was not served in shops; I was even turned away from the church. These were the indignities that we had to suffer, with resilience and determination. We were made to feel as though we did not belong. We felt a sense of betrayal, as the general public knew nothing about us, but we were too proud to return or tell families back in the Caribbean about the hardship, discrimination and rejection we were facing. Besides, there was little money, because the jobs available were low paid. My mother had three jobs in a day to try to make ends meet.

All this meant that culturally, people from that generation did not go on holiday, travel abroad, register for a passport or take part in any national register. This partly explains why so many people did not have the necessary documents and became caught up in the Windrush scandal, facing unbelievable hostility with little compassion, consideration or cultural understanding, some dying due to the stress and trauma.

Thanks to much campaigning, the Windrush compensation scheme was meant to help correct the injustice, but little progress has been made. Minimal funds have been paid out and faith in the Home Office is at an all-time low. To move forward, trust in the Home Office needs to be restored, as it is still associated with the hostile environment, complicated forms and deportation flights. Trust is also needed in the appeals system, especially when cultural decisions are to be made, and in those in the Caribbean who are part of the scandal.

How does the Home Office intend to restore that trust? One suggestion is for the Government, in order to restore confidence, to establish an independent advisory group and chair, reporting directly to the Cabinet Office, on the implementation of all 30 vital recommendations of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review by Wendy Williams. The Windrush monument will be a way to define and celebrate black British history. Let it not be the Windrush scandal.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

Lord Woolf? We cannot hear the noble and learned Lord; we will perhaps come back to him. Lord Sheikh.

Domestic Violence: Police Resources

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I certainly welcome the visit of the Justice Committee. As to whether we have lessons to learn, I am sure that we have lessons to learn from each other in examples of good practice. However, I say to the noble Lord that I am proud to stand here, given what this Government have done over the past seven years to help victims of domestic violence.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, many children and young people suffer from domestic violence after seeing pornography and other violent acts online. What are the Government doing to encourage the police to go into schools and talk to young people about this kind of crime and the support that victims would get from them if it is happening to them?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, sex and relationship services within schools are a good forum in which to discuss not only what healthy relationships look like but what unhealthy relationships look like. Online providers are alive to what sort of material is suitable for viewing by children, and the Home Secretary is working with CSPs to improve their response to it.

Modern Slavery (Victim Support) Bill [HL]

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 8th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I am proud to lend my support to this Bill put forward by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, who has a long history of working to ensure that those affected by human trafficking are suitably protected. I salute him for all his efforts. The Government, too, must be congratulated on introducing the much-needed Modern Slavery Act, which has raised the awareness of this evil practice and ensures that more perpetrators are apprehended and punished.

The Prime Minister quite rightly called modern slavery,

“the great human rights issue of our time”.

With this declaration in mind, we must seek to go further, if we truly want to rid the UK—and indeed the world—of slavery in its modern forms. We must examine the contexts and situations that make people vulnerable to exploitation, be they girls in the British care system, women from Nigeria or men from Romania. We as a modern society need to truly understand what modern slavery entails, as was so eloquently set out by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby. So alongside our new, more robust criminal legislation, it is vital that we evaluate how we treat the victims of this most awful, degrading, wicked and cruel crime, which involves mental, physical, emotional and sexual abuse and which abuses human dignity, destroys confidence and self-esteem and ruins lives.

Unsurprisingly, many of the vulnerable victims of this hideous crime are children. More than a third of the 3,805 victims of modern slavery identified by the National Crime Agency in the UK last year were children. So we must raise our game in this area and reach out to help those young people whose lives have been blighted by the misery, abuse and exploitation of modern-day slavery. They need intensive levels of dedicated and specialist support to help to rebuild their lives so that they become young, active and healthy adults. Presently, for child victims in the UK, this is not the status quo.

I understand that the response to children trafficked in the UK is often severely lacking and inconsistent. Many young victims receive minimal support and are even put at risk of being retrafficked by unscrupulous criminals because of failures in their identification and care. A report by ECPAT UK last year showed that nearly 30% of children identified as trafficked went missing from care at least once, with many never being found. Budget cuts mean that local authorities are struggling to meet the needs of this particularly vulnerable group of children.

We cannot and must not allow this to continue. To truly help these children we must address the failings in the identification and support systems that currently exist. Children of all nationalities who have been exploited should be guaranteed access to specialist care and support. Childhood lasts a lifetime, so if we do not provide this type of support we are building up enormous problems for the future, especially mental health problems, which cause instability, anxiety, a total loss of confidence and lack of trust in humanity.

I therefore intend to put down an amendment in Committee to ensure that this important Bill on victim support includes specific provisions for the specialist support that child victims also need. In the long term, failing to act will result in both a financial and a moral cost to our society. We need to have the moral courage and determination to support children, who are victims of modern enslavement through no fault of their own, and to give them hope for the future.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 9th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, for securing this debate, and I would like to concentrate on a subject that I know she has worked hard on—the harmful effects of pornography on young girls and women, not just in the UK but across the world.

This country is leading the fight on safeguarding, and other countries are watching what we do to combat this invasion of every part of our global society. Some might say that porn has been around for a long time but the rise of the internet has turned it into a global industry with a multi-billion pound turnover each year, exploiting women in order to make profits.

Pornography is having a major impact on a large number of young girls here in the UK who say that it has a negative effect on their lives and on how they are perceived and treated in society. It encourages the use of derogatory language about girls and young women. Many believe that pornography influences how women are portrayed in the media and online, as it shows harmful views and far too often shows women as sex objects. However, it also affects mental health and causes depression, anxieties and self-harm. It contributes to women being treated less fairly and creates unrealistic expectations of women’s bodies. It normalises aggressive or violent behaviour towards women and sends out confusing messages about sexual consent. It puts pressure on girls to have sex before they are ready and to perform sex acts, because boys copy what they see in pornography. Worst of all, as reported by the NSPCC, there have been more incidents of child-on-child sex abuse. The thought of all this pressure on girls makes me weep.

I recently received correspondence from Girlguiding on why we need less porn and more education in our schools. One girl said, “Imagine sitting happily in a lesson, concentrating on whatever subject is before you, only to be jolted into shock as you see an explicit image being passed around the classroom under the desks by boys”. This sort of thing is happening to girls as young as 11 in classrooms, corridors and playgrounds all across the UK.

According to Girlguiding, 60% of girls aged 11 to 16 report having seen boys of their age viewing porn on their phones, and all too often boys are using it to make girls feel uncomfortable or pressured, passing it off as a “bit of banter”. However, we need to identify this behaviour for what it is—sexual harassment, used as a weapon to bully, hurt and intimidate others. It gives boys the impression that it is normal to be violent or dominant and to act in a forceful way around girls, both during sex and in their wider relationships. But young people cannot escape these images.

One way to tackle this scourge is through legislation, and thankfully that will happen through the Digital Economy Bill, which will introduce age verification for access to online pornography. This will go some way to protect children and young people from the ability to easily access pornography. It will reduce the exposure to pornography and the harm it can cause on a global scale. I fully support this policy, which I have been advocating for several years. I have longed for this to happen. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for her relentless campaign, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, for her sterling work in this area and in helping to make this legislation possible, especially as she has a global influence on this type of policy. She made a promise to me and to this House that it would happen, so I thank her for keeping that promise.

I also pay tribute to the lead that the Prime Minister, Theresa May, has taken in tackling violence against women, especially in the Digital Economy Bill. The Bill will provide a means of enforcing the strong standards in this country concerning violence towards women in an online as well as offline environment so that prohibited material, which includes extremely violent pornography, will be blocked. It would be good to hear the Minister confirm this. Any suggestion that we wanted to make space in an online environment for violence against women as entertainment would clearly send quite the wrong message, fostering a world in which this violence could become more and more normal and acceptable. That will not do.

I also strongly believe that social media and search engines should play a role in ensuring children are not exposed to pornographic content by blocking or closing down offending sites, as many of them come from outside the UK. There should be an expectation for all internet platforms to address violations and companies should take responsibility for how their platforms are used. A recent report about Facebook not taking down child pornography groups is an example of how this irresponsible attitude exists right now.

Alongside this responsibility comes quality personal, social and health education and age-appropriate sex and relationship education, which should be taught in all schools to teach young people about the benefits and risks of using the internet and how to stay safe online. The scale of pornography that children and young people are having to cope with is becoming an epidemic and needs to be counterbalanced with education. Girls have to understand how they can be in control in any situation they find themselves in; to have the courage to stand up and say no; to develop high self-esteem and to feel worthy. All this comes through education and inspirational role models.

It was wonderful to hear Justine Greening, Secretary of State for Education, at last announce that sex and relationship education will become compulsory in all schools. It should, of course, be age appropriate and I hope that the lessons that most young people attend will cover things like consent, sexting, sexual harassment, domestic violence, sexually-transmitted diseases, healthy relationships and gender equality. These are issues that can build a well-rounded attitude of how to cope with life.

Although the subject of today’s debate is about women and girls, it is the effect of porn on boys and young men and their attitudes to women which is deeply concerning because it is women who bear the brunt of emotional, sexual and domestic violence. Unless we get a grip and wake up to the dangers facing society we will leave behind a terrible legacy which will echo across generations to come. Therefore, we must be bold global leaders in the field of helping to protect, inspire and motivate girls and women to have the courage to stand up for themselves and not be forced into doing things they are uncomfortable with—never. That should be our legacy to girls and women everywhere across the world.

Online Safety

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for being so resilient in bringing matters of online safety for children to your Lordships’ House. I am also pleased that the noble Baroness mentioned the Government’s statement on Monday, which suggested that content filtering by internet service providers may not encounter any difficulties as the result of the EU net neutrality rules. This is welcome news. However, I am a little nervous that there still seems to be enough uncertainty that the Government feel that they need to legislate to ensure that the filtering is on a solid legal footing. But I shall wait to see what the Minister has to say.

I have consistently supported the previous Online Safety Bills of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, when they were debated here in the House, with the objective of putting ISP filtering on a statutory footing. As the noble Baroness has set out, throughout the history of the current arrangements with the big four ISPs, we seem to have gone back and forth between discussions of “active choice” and “default-on”. I know that “active choice” was favoured because it was felt that parents would be more engaged if they had actively to decide what to do about the filtering levels, which is a fair point. Given how much time children and young people spend online, it is hard to see how parents can avoid being engaged. It is most encouraging to read the latest statistics, which say that parents are engaging in different ways to keep their children safe. Thank goodness for that.

As we are talking today about content filters, I hope your Lordships will allow me to share with you what Ofcom’s 2016 report on children and the media says about parental awareness and the use of ISP content filters. It tells us that slightly more parents of five to 15 year-olds are using ISP content filters in 2016 than in 2015—31% compared to 26%—95% of whom said they were useful. However, there is no room for complacency, as only 58% of parents of five to 15 year-olds say they are aware of the filters. If that many parents who use the filters say they are useful, surely we should be encouraging more than 31% of parents to use them.

Ofcom published research at the end of 2015 which showed that among the big four there are radically different results on uptake of internet filters. While Sky has used the “default-on” model proposed by the former Prime Minister, BT has elected to use “active choice”. The differences are striking. Ofcom stated that in June 2015 BT reported that 8% of its new customers and 5% of its existing customers had taken up parental controls. Sky, by contrast, reported that 61% of its existing customers had chosen parental controls in the age 13 group. Another 1% had set the protections at PG, and a further 8% chose the 18 category.

Interestingly, on 25 October Sky was asked about its “default-on” policy when it gave oral evidence to the Lords Communications Select Committee, of which I am a member, during its inquiry into children and the internet. Sky told the committee that the evidence on active choice was a take-up of around 8% to 10%. It went on to explain that it had changed its approach. Rather than asking its customers,

“‘Do you want it on, yes/no?’, we said, ‘We have put it on. You can turn it off if you want’ and, lo and behold, the take-up rate has gone up to 60%, so we are pretty convinced it is the right thing to do. We are the only fixed-line broadband company to do that, and we introduced a new broadband service, Now TV broadband, and we launched it completely default-on earlier this year. We have considered both options and we are pretty confident we have got the right outcome, if the objective is high parental engagement and high take-up of controls”.

Looking at the figures showing how many young people go online, I would argue that for many good reasons we want high parental engagement and a high take-up of controls. That is why we should review the options in front of us today.

In oral evidence to the Lords Communications Select Committee on 1 November, Ofcom gave a similar story. It said:

“ISPs that have had the most success with takeup—if success is measured by take-up—are those that have adopted a default-on process. I think it is fairly clear, based on behavioural economics, that people are much less likely to opt out than they are to opt in. Of course, it is a small set of data, but I think the default-on in these circumstances has indicated that it drives take-up”.

Ofcom went on to say:

“Default-on does drive take-up. It is as simple as that. … There is a question for the ISPs themselves whether or not other ISPs want to follow suit with Sky, whether or not they think that the benefits outweigh the risks to their customer base. It is also for policymakers and for Parliament to decide”.

There we have it.

As I have said many times in this House, childhood lasts a lifetime. What children see and experience stays with them for ever, as was graphically revealed recently in the football sex abuse scandal. I hope that the Minister, who I know is also committed to this issue, will consider these points and legislate for so-called default-on to keep our children and young people safe online.