Baroness Brinton
Main Page: Baroness Brinton (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Online Safety Bill [HL]
Baroness Brinton Excerpts
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I agree with colleagues and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, for raising this very important issue to consider through this Bill how children access pornography or programmes that might put them at risk of being groomed by predators and paedophiles. I say at the outset that the age verification element is very important. It is helpful, as others have said, that the general attitude today finds the idea of exposing our children to adult material, and especially to grooming, absolutely abhorrent. At last.
The Bailey review of last year provides a helpful exposition of the problem and its complexities and the difficulties of finding a workable solution. He also emphasised the importance of working with parents, guardians and carers, which includes anyone with responsibility for a child, including children in care. We often talk just about parents but it is actually those with any responsibility for a child. I also welcome the Government’s recent consultation on online protection and am sorry that the timing of this Second Reading is too early to hear the results of that consultation.
This brief Bill tries to provide a mechanism to protect our children and I absolutely applaud the sentiment. However, I want to propose that there may be more than one way of doing this because I fear that there are some unintended consequences from following the route of automatic filters for all on every electronic device, which the householder has to apply to have reduced. I shall come to this in a minute.
First, though, I want to raise the technical term of the definition in Clause 5 on interpretation, which says:
““image” and “pornographic” have the same meaning as in section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008”.
Your Lordships will see in the Act that the definition of pornographic is held within Section 63, headed:
“Possession of extreme pornographic images”.
Section 63(1) says:
“It is an offence for a person to be in possession of an extreme pornographic image”.
Note here the word “extreme”, because it goes on to say:
“An “extreme pornographic image” is an image which is both—
(a) pornographic, and
(b) an extreme image”.
The third subsection then defines pornographic, as we have heard, such that:
“An image is “pornographic” if it is of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal”.
The remainder of the section continues with definitions. The formal definition of extreme pornography takes 13 lines, and rightly so. I will not read that now but the point I am trying to make is that the definition of pornography in that Act—that is, legal pornography which is not extreme and illegal—is briefly referred to in passing to subsequently define extreme pornography, which is what that Act is trying to define for the courts.
Such a simplistic definition of pornography will cause immense problems in our courts. How do you define arousal and to what level of arousal—partial, full? Is that arousal the view of the average person on the Clapham omnibus, or should the definition cover the various fetishes that people may have? The famous film director Quentin Tarantino is a foot fetishist. There are a number of people who have assessed his use of bare feet in all his films. Clearly they arouse people with the said fetish.
Secondly, this limited definition of pornography would exclude much of the world’s classic works of art. Thirty years ago I was working with Jonathan Miller on the BBC production of “Troilus and Cressida”, which we had set in the Hundred Years War. We used some of the delightful pictures of Cranach the Elder, showing nudes of young women with the barest film of gossamer material across their bodies. Groundbreaking in Cranach’s day, this nudity still arouses passion in many who view them, as have thousands of artists over the subsequent seven centuries. Are these images pornographic? Unfortunately under some of the automatic filter systems at the moment, they are.
This brings me to my second concern. The current filters on the market, which the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, referred to, are pretty crude and inevitably filter out more than just pornography. I wish there were another word to describe them, but it is true. They are a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Let me give you some brief examples.
Some years ago, my late father-in-law, an academic, suddenly stopped receiving e-mails. After a while he went to see the IT experts at his university. “Ah,” they said, “it is our new filter to stop you accessing naughty sites. The problem is that there is a key banned word in every e-mail that you are getting. It is your first name, Dick”. He had to have his own name unfiltered. These filters have not improved since. One of my colleagues here in Parliament was working for an MP, on the Sexual Offences Bill. She suddenly discovered that she was not receiving briefings from outside organisations by e-mail, because they contained either the word “sexual” in the subject line or attachments, or references to rape or other forms of sexual abuse. Thankfully she picked this up. A friend was working for one of the charities at the time and she was able to get her e-mails unblocked, but it could have had an impact on how Parliament scrutinised that particular piece of legislation.
How, you might ask, do these examples affect children who might be trying to access information on the net? Stonewall has expressed real concern about automatic filter systems for young people worried about their sexuality, who want to seek safe information and advice. Over half of the gay young people in a University of Cambridge survey for Stonewall reported homophobic bullying at their schools, with many citing worrying levels of depression and anxiety. Many students reported that their schools used such filters, which meant that they were unable to seek help from organisations such as Stonewall if they put the words “homosexual” or “gay” into the online search engine, because they were blocked.
Over the last five years, the Liberal Democrat youth movement has run a very effective campaign in further and higher education, and it is therefore available to 16 to 18 year-olds, called “Homophobia is Gay”. It, too, would be banned under these filters. It has been groundbreaking in getting young people to think, first, about the language they use and, secondly, to review their behaviour which might be bullying.
Many of our newspapers would also be banned. The Daily Mail, which I understand is very keen on this Bill—and I applaud the sentiments behind its campaign—would hit a problem with the crude image-filtering mechanism for photos, which assesses the percentage of bare flesh. It is not clever enough to work out whether a girl has a bikini top on and such an image would therefore be classified in exactly the same way as page three of the Sun. There is a fundamental problem with the technology at present, which needs to be addressed urgently. The Bill as written will not encourage this sophistication. It needs to. Perhaps this can be addressed at Committee stage.
Finally, there is the key issue of which is more effective; opt-in or opt-out. This Bill proposes an automatic filter that individuals would have to opt in to subscribe to pornography by asking their ISP to change the levels. Given the problems outlined above, I suspect that many parents would get incredibly frustrated with the crude nature of the filter and I am concerned that some of them might opt in. I prefer an opt-in system, which asks you as a parent—defined in the wider sense right at the start—when you have a new device, be it phone, TV, or computer, what levels you want to set. My cable TV company already does this and most telephone companies are following suit, given that most phones now act as mini-computers. We set the levels ourselves when our children were teenagers. Interestingly, on the communal computers and TV at home, even though the children are well over 18, we have never bothered to reset them. I suspect that most households are the same.
Much of the progress in this area is down to the work of the Internet Watch Foundation. This is not known to many lay people, because it works specifically with the ISPs, telcos and cable companies. It has been doing so quietly behind the scenes over the last decade, encouraging them to have peer regulation. I would hope that it would be a key part of the solution, blocking illegal sites daily as it does, using peer pressure among the companies to bring the providers into line and making sure that they give parents access to sensible filters. That is the important reason to have more sophisticated opt-in arrangements, rather than a pure opt-out system. Parents must be involved.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre website emphasises to children and parents—especially parents—how important it is to talk to each other. Its top tips start with the advice to talk to your child about what they are up to online and to be a part of their online life. This is vital. Children who are being groomed, for example, feel themselves in a cycle of fear and shame where they think no one will believe them. Childline reports that children feel themselves to blame for what is happening to them. Any chance of parents having relaxed conversations with their children about what they are doing on line, as they, the parents, set the filter levels, often with the children doing the technology, is much more likely to encourage children to talk to their parents if they are worried.
I applaud this Bill. It has the best intentions, but I worry that there are three or four areas which will need to be explored more at Committee stage to provide reassurance that it will not be a crude tool that will defeat its admirable aims of protecting our children.
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, I am pleased and honoured to be speaking on behalf of my party at the end of this important debate, held after a week or so during which the safety of our children, both online and off, has been in the headlines and in all our thoughts. I should begin by declaring an interest as a proud and newly recruited champion of the Internet Watch Foundation, an example of successful UK self-regulation on criminal child sexual abuse content. Happily, that is not our concern here today.
I also need to put on the record that my husband, John Carr, who has already been referred to in this debate, is, among other things, an adviser to the United Nations on exactly these issues. He sits on the UK Government’s principal advisory body, the UK Council for Child Internet Safety. On behalf of the UK Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, for which the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, was speaking, he is pro bono secretary. He spoke at the seminar held by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and gave evidence to Claire Perry MP’s excellent all-party inquiry concerning online protections. It is not often that one has a declaration of interests concerning one’s partner that is larger than one’s own but in this case I felt that it was important to put those things on the record.
Noble Lords have a right to assume that my contribution today should be technically competent but the views I express are on behalf of the Labour Party. We need to see this Bill in the context of a fast-moving world. The first time I spoke in your Lordships’ House about the internet and child safety was over 10 years ago and my speech concerned the then unfamiliar crime of grooming children on the internet, the dangers that that posed and the problems associated with chatrooms. That was long before the days of Facebook. As technology moves on, as well as providing everyone with new and wonderful opportunities in the online world, including our young people, it poses new challenges, particularly regarding their safety. There are many ways that technology is present in our lives.
Like the right reverend Prelate, I am not a techno wizard but, for example, I watched the American presidential election results by taking the BBC coverage on my iPod to bed and having my BlackBerry at hand for those essential texts with a daughter in Cambodia, a son in Brussels and a husband in Azerbaijan at the Internet Governance Forum this week, to keep them in the picture. I was the political information hub for my family for the night. I shared tweets with friends in America who were on the spot and I saw the newly elected President’s tweet announcing his victory.
This was all possible because of one wi-fi connection in my home. As my noble friend Lord Harris said, in a home with children of different ages there will be many devices. There could be a digital TV that is internet-enabled, several laptops, iPads, iTouches, a desktop computer, games consoles, BlackBerrys, smart phones and other mobile devices. I recently saw an article which suggested that in many family homes today it is not at all unusual to find 18 or more appliances connected to the internet.
So while we hope and want every parent to pay attention to what their child or young person is doing online, the reality is that this may not happen for any number of reasons many of which have already been mentioned. Indeed, online safety is not a one-off event. It is not something that a parent does and then forgets about. Whatever the technical solutions, we still need parents to engage on an ongoing basis. But what about the families where no amount of outreach to parents and no amount of media literacy work is ever going to have any impact? What if the parents in question do not even read or understand the English language?
What the noble Baroness’s Bill proposes is to make that process easier, better, surer, because it automatically removes from the equation material that, by common consent, should not be there in the first place for younger users. It demands that a technical solution be found to help with this problem, as well as the important issues mentioned in Clause 3. As many noble Lords have said, this is a huge and growing problem. A company that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, has already referred to called MetaCert recently produced a free application that blocks only pornography sites that can be accessed via an iPad. The fact that startled me was that they found over 640 million pages to block containing porn, some of which would be hard core.
The Wolak Mitchell and Finekhor research shows that that 42% of 10 to 17 year-olds were exposed to online pornography and 37% of 16 to 17 year-old boys are visiting adult sites. Some of them will become addicted to pornography. I know some will say, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, that this is the natural curiosity of a pubescent young man. In the past, we would all have recognised this as being a top-shelf matter. Indeed, noble Lords smiled as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned his own curiosity.
It is a very different matter today. It is a very different thing if the top shelf and publications that would not be on the top shelf—that would have to be accessed in brown paper envelopes from places in Soho that would not be easily available— are in your son’s and your daughter’s bedrooms on a screen available to them at any time. They are on the iPad that they may take and share with their friends. If one puts that together with the fact that Ofcom recently reported that a third of 3 and 4 year-olds now have access to internet-enabled devices, what price the media literacy of that age group? We all have a responsibility here. That is why, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said, all the children’s organisations strongly support this Bill. I understand that CEOP and many experts support the thrust of this Bill.
I do not intend to explore the different technical ways of achieving the Bill’s objective as outlined in Clause 1, but ask the Minister two questions. Are the Government in favour of the principle of establishing age verification as the basis for allowing access to adult content on the internet in any and all environments? Should such a policy be seen as migrating to the virtual world the practices almost universally accepted and understood in the real world, for example, in relation to sex shops and cinemas?
This Bill contains a simple proposition: all internet access providers should restrict the availability of adult content on the internet to persons who have been verified as being 18 or above. It is now the case, with only one exception, that all the mobile phone companies have been blocking adult content on a voluntary basis since 2004 for all their pay-as-you-go phones because, as noble Lords will be aware, they are the ones most commonly used by children and young people.
If all the UK’s major wi-fi providers intend not to allow any adult content on any of the services they provide to the public—for example, in railway stations, hotels or, as my noble friend Lady Massey explained, in Starbucks coffee houses and other places, many of which will not even allow an age verification option—the adult bar will be fixed. Therefore, it will soon be impossible for anyone out and about to access adult content online on a mobile, either at all or without going through an age verification process. The only place where this will not apply will be the home. The only place where pornography and other adult content will be easily accessible to children and young people will be in their home. I cannot see that that is right. Does the Minister agree with our analysis on this matter?
I invite the Government to join us in welcoming this Bill and the principle it contains. I call on the Minister to declare his support for the principle behind the Bill—that adult content on the internet should be restricted to adults and a way must be found to make that happen. I am surprised by some of the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I respectfully suggest that she may be out of date in the technology that is available and the anecdotes that she told the House. As other noble Lords have said, this is such a problem that I would be surprised if she were saying on behalf of the Liberal Democrat Benches that they think the status quo is adequate, because I do not think that anybody else in the House would agree with them on that matter.
Baroness Brinton
I intervene to clarify things. I did not say that my party thinks the status quo is satisfactory and I made that very clear during my speech. I hope that the noble Baroness will see that when she looks at Hansard tomorrow. I also make clear that some of the anecdotes that I have raised are contemporary, particularly the ones about Stonewall and schools.
Baroness Thornton
I obviously accept that the noble Baroness is not speaking on behalf of her party and I find that a great relief.
Baroness Brinton
I am sorry to intervene again but that is not what I said. I said that the point of my speech was to make it clear that there are problems with the Bill, not that we think that the status quo needs to remain the same.
Baroness Thornton
That underlines my relief. I am very relieved to hear that that is indeed the case. We all know that there are legitimate questions about how it will be implemented or how it might work, but today I am seeking a commitment about the desirability of the principle, which seems to me crystal clear and correct.
Like others, I am aware that this Government have been concerned about this issue and have not been inactive. I know that the Prime Minister himself has often expressed very firm views about this matter. However, we know that solving this is not straightforward. There are possibly, on my count, at least five or six government departments involved in the policy development. Obviously, the Department for Education is involved as it has responsibility for children and education, possibly the Department of Health, which has an interest in safeguarding nought to five year-olds under the new arrangements in the Health Act; the Home Office, the Justice Department, the DCMS—hence the noble Viscount, Lord Younger of Leckie, is replying to the debate on behalf of that department—and BIS because of the business interests concerned. If I have left anyone out I apologise, but that, indeed, is why government has to act and why I am going to conclude with the following suggestions and requests.
Like my noble friend Lady Massey, I want specifically to say that I am aware that in Summer 2011 the “big four” ISPs—that is BT, Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk—gave the Prime Minister a specific undertaking to implement active choice before October 2012: that is, before the end of last month. I think that they reiterated their pledge at a special summit which the Prime Minister called in Downing Street. I would like to know whether they have done what they have promised. In particular, I would like to know what each company is doing in relation to active choice for new and existing customers. The House needs to know what each company is doing to assist in relation to wi-fi routers in the homes where their customers live. In other words, will there be any way that their solutions will help to ensure that the controls parents might set on the PC or main device also automatically work in relation to all other devices using the same connection, or do the poor parents have to go through the same routine on every single device in their home? These are important matters germane to the progress of this Bill. If the Minister does not have this information to hand, I would be very happy for him to write to me and copy his answer to all noble Lords who have spoken today. My noble friend Lord Harris is absolutely correct, the Government appear to be dithering on this matter and they need to stop doing so.
We on these Benches call on the Government to get on with making online protection of children happen. If not in this Bill, can I have a cast iron assurance from the Government that they will establish a working party or a task force, as called for by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, to report back within six months on the practicalities and technicalities of how adult content on the internet can be restricted to adults and how that might be implemented?
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and other noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and look forward to working with them on the Bill.