Online Child Abuse

Debate between Angela Crawley and Madeleine Moon

Wednesday 20th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)]

I welcome you to your post, Mrs Moon, and I welcome the Minister and the shadow Minister to theirs. It is excellent to see strong and confident women in those positions and I am sure they will take their challenges and responsibilities seriously. I congratulate the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) on securing the debate on an issue that she has worked and campaigned tirelessly on, not least through her work on Dare2Care. It is fair to say she has gone above and beyond her public duty to tackle this issue. She takes it incredibly seriously, which I am sure all hon. Members in the Chamber also do.

This is a broad debate. Online abuse covers any type that happens on the web. We have already heard about the role of social networks, messenger services, chatrooms, playing online and mobile phones. Anecdotally, as one of the younger Members in the Chamber, I received my first mobile phone at the age of 13. It was a Nokia 2210, on which someone could play snake or push their luck by texting home and asking if they could stay out late.

That was what mobiles meant to me and my generation but times have certainly changed, with 24/7 social media online. I cannot even keep up with the current trend of Pokémon Go, and I am obviously too busy to play it. Through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, online abuse is a new and growing phenomenon. With the increasing use of the internet across the UK and the world, and with the advent of smartphones, our young people are now more vulnerable than ever before, and traditional understanding of child abuse has been deepened and compounded by that fact.

At this point, it is important to recall the words of the hon. Member for Rotherham and many others who have contributed to the debate highlighting the instances of bullying, in particular of the LGBT community; the rates of suicide and self-harm, which cannot and must not be ignored; the influences of apps, games and other online devices; and the role and increasing accessibility of online pornography. It is fair to say that this is a very different world from the one I started in, and future generations will come into a very different world still, so our resilience, understanding and approach are absolutely vital.

The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) —I have the honour of serving on the Committee of which she is the Chairwoman—highlighted the need for protections in the design and build of apps. The hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts)—I hope she forgives me for terribly pronouncing the name of her constituency—highlighted the need for databases, but how many instances go unrecorded? The hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) highlighted the role of dating apps and the potential for fake profiles. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) recognised with his always measured and reasonable approach the need to strike a balance, and the need for all of us to work collaboratively across devolved nations and reserved competencies to ensure we tackle the issues head on, and that we do not underestimate the challenges we face.

Children, as we have heard, experience cyberbullying, grooming, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation and emotional abuse through devices and services that have become integral parts of their social lives. We need to look only at the Channel 4 documentary “Cyberbully”. “Game of Thrones” star Maisie Williams highlighted to me and to many parents out there the challenges and difficulties that young people face simply by sitting in front of a PC, laptop or mobile phone. In this day and age, the internet gives abusers unprecedented access to children and the ability to contact them at any time, day or night. It erodes traditional safe spaces. Children can be at risk of online abuse from both strangers and people they know.

The NSPCC has outlined some of the difficulties for children facing online abuse. Children will often not tell anyone about online abuse because they feel guilty or ashamed. When they would like to tell someone, they often do not know who to go to, and many will not even realise they are being abused. According to Ofcom, one in five eight to 11-year-olds and seven in 10 12 to 15-year-olds have social media profiles. The number of children who are at risk is increasing and we must do more to safeguard them.

The scale of the problem has not been pinned down by any definitive or official figures. The fact is that we simply do not know the scale of the problem, but that does not mean we cannot put protections in place to tackle it. In 2014, studies found that one in four children between the ages of 11 and 16 had experienced upsetting or abusive language online while on social networks, and one in three children had been the victim of cyberbullying. Youth engagement organisations such as DoSomething.org suggest that nearly 43% of children have been bullied online. More worryingly, in 2015 the Internet Watch Foundation identified 68,000 websites containing child abuse images.

If we dispense with the statistics for a moment, it is fair to say that we do not yet know the full scale of this issue, but we know we must do more to tackle it. It is hard to underestimate the work that must be done and is already being done by many charitable organisations to tackle child abuse. The information and statistics supplied by the NSPCC and other charities and organisations are up to date and highly informative in dealing with abuse.

I want to highlight the work of the Scottish Government—I say this not to be political, but simply to enhance the debate. Since 2009, online safety has been monitored by the Scottish Government-led stakeholder group on child internet safety, which has made a number of recommendations. In recent years—as early as 2014—those recommendations resulted in a refresh of national guidance and child protection policies. Recent developments such as the national action plan for tackling sexual exploitation and the cyber-resilience strategy outline that Scotland takes this issue incredibly seriously. The Scottish National party condemns all instances of online abuse and welcomes any efforts to strengthen legislation in order to tackle it. The Scottish Government firmly believe that online abuse is unacceptable. Scotland’s anti-bullying services—

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Lady is eating into the Minister’s time. Can she bring her remarks to a conclusion? She has had more than her allotted five minutes.

[Angela Crawley]

Forgive me, Mrs Moon. I will close by simply saying that, to tackle this problem and the scale of it, we must collaborate and co-operate with one another.