Protecting Children Online

Debate between Ann Coffey and Claire Perry

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we have two separate buckets. Some imagery is unequivocally illegal, but we would find other imagery exceptionally unpalatable and not want our young people to see it. Given that 88% of mainstream porn involves violence against women, we need to improve the filters to try to stop that coming into the home.

Another recommendation of the cross-party inquiry was that public wi-fi should be filtered. There is no need to see adult content on public wi-fi. That has been implemented in the majority of cases and we are looking for universal clean public wi-fi to be implemented later this year.

[Ann Coffey]

I, too, congratulate the hon. Lady on her work and on the huge contribution she has made. Has she had any discussions with the retail industry on public wi-fi?

[Claire Perry]

I have not, but retailers source their wi-fi from a small number of providers, which have agreed to provide what is effectively clean public wi-fi.

We asked the Government for a formal consultation on opt-in filtering and got it. As the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) has rightly said, it is not clear that the consultation was entirely representative and democratic. However, it was an open consultation and we did our damndest to encourage people to respond. Consultations are not always democratic, and that one was what it was. Basically, the consultation rejected the idea of opt-in, but the Government response was clear that we should have much better filters that protect all devices; robust age verification; and a system that people cannot simply click through, and in which the filters remain on unless people choose to take them off.

Those changes are being implemented by the four main ISPs, which control more than 80% of the internet market to the home in the UK, and will be rolled out to new customers by the year end.

Violence against Women and Girls

Debate between Ann Coffey and Claire Perry

Thursday 14th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), who has done some fantastic work in the area of improving online protection for children.

Last week, I visited the St Mary’s sexual assault referral centre, which was the first of its kind to be established in the UK. There are now 41 across England and Wales. St Mary’s sees women, men and children, the youngest being three weeks old and the eldest 93 years old, and has more than 1,000 cases a year, of which just under half are children. The centre provides a range of services, including forensic medical examinations to collect evidence and document injuries; counselling, including pre-trial therapy; child advocates to support children and families; a young person’s advocate aimed at identifying those at risk of being sexually exploited; and independent sexual violence advisers, who offer practical support through the process.

The recent tragic suicide of Frances Andrade demonstrates the extent of the psychological damage suffered as a result of sexual assault, its enduring nature and the risk to victims of court proceedings. St Mary’s provides a holistic service to meet individual needs so that victims do not have to fight their way through various referral criteria and thresholds to get help. It is a valuable and important resource with a committed and experienced team.

Greater Manchester police have predominantly funded the sexual assault referral centre, including follow-on psychosocial support, in the belief, supported by evidence, that if victims feel supported they are more likely to have confidence and therefore continue with the criminal justice process. There are concerns, however, that changes as part of the restructuring of the NHS in April 2013, and changes in police funding in 2015, will result in deficit funding and the fragmentation of services that are currently offered at St Mary’s. Without those services, an 80-year-old woman would not be able to talk about the abuse that she has kept secret for years, and children who have been sexually exploited would not get the support that they need to feel confident enough to be a witness against their abuser in court. I would be grateful if the Minister looked into that for me.

Of course it would be better if children never had to be referred to St Mary’s, as the team there would agree, but that means that we need much earlier intervention in children’s lives. I have talked to the team working with sexually exploited children referred by the police as the result of an investigation, and they told me that children were sometimes reluctant to talk to them as they did not initially see themselves as sexually exploited. It is horrifying that many sexually exploited children are subjected to intimidation, coercion, blackmail and threats of violence, but it is equally shocking that others think their abuser cares about them.

To understand what we need to put in place to prevent violence and the abuse of children, we need to understand the long, sad journey of some children to becoming victims of sexual exploitation. They are often the type of neglected children about whom Action for Children talked in its recent report—children who feel so alone and so lacking in self-esteem that they welcome any attention, and who have no understanding of what a caring relationship is about because they have never seen one. Often, such children never reach the threshold for intervention by any services, so their neglect goes undetected. We can see why they are vulnerable to sexual grooming and how important it is to identify vulnerable children in their early childhood.

That is why I am impressed by Stockport’s supporting families pathway, which enables referrals to all council and other local services to be recorded on a single shared database. That means that a complete picture of a child’s life can be built up, and there can be early detection of children who are struggling. At the moment, the model that we have means that children have to reach a certain threshold to be referred to services, and that threshold is often reached far too late in a child’s life. The sharing of data across all agencies would enable a vulnerable child to be identified much earlier. The question would then be not whether their need was great enough to access services but what would be the most appropriate intervention that we could make to help them.

Of course, schools have an important role in safeguarding children. I believe that compulsory sex and relationship education in schools would give children and young people the confidence to reject inappropriate relationships.

[Claire Perry]

Does the hon. Lady agree that the consultation on computing content is an encouraging part of the consideration of the new curriculum? That includes communicating safely and respectfully online, keeping personal information private and general common sense in the internet space. That would go some way towards dealing with some of the problems that she has addressed.

[Ann Coffey]

I do agree, and I was interested to hear the hon. Lady talk about that yesterday.

Sex and relationships education in schools is very important, because it can help children to understand when they are being groomed by older men for sexual exploitation or involved in sexually coercive relationships by their peers. Both the Director of Public Prosecutions and the deputy Children’s Commissioner have spoken recently about the impact of pornography on young men who commit sexual and relationship violence. I was also concerned to read in a report by the chief inspector of probation, out last week, that some professionals fail to combat sexual offending by children because they miss warning signs. That report, conducted by probation inspectors, studied 24 teenage boys with convictions ranging from indecent assault to rape and found that opportunities to intervene when the offender was young had been missed in nearly every case.