Online Abuse

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Joan Ryan (in the Chair)]

I draw hon. Members’ attention to the fact that our proceedings are being made accessible for people who are deaf or hearing impaired. The interpreters are using British Sign Language, and parliamentlive.tv will show a live simultaneous interpretation and live subtitling of the debate.

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 190627 relating to online abuse.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. The petition was started by Katie Price following the abuse of her son Harvey online. The Petitions Committee set up an inquiry into the subject, throughout which we have been led by the experiences of disabled people. We held an event in Westminster to listen to their experiences and scope out our inquiry, as well as six further events around the country. We took formal evidence from the police, technology companies, charities, the Minister and disabled people themselves, and we published draft recommendations and consulted on them. I think we were the first Select Committee to do so, and we held further events around the country to make that work.

I place on record my thanks to all the people who gave so generously of their time to engage with us, and to the Select Committee staff, who not only worked extremely hard on the inquiry but travelled widely throughout the country to do so. That engagement was very important to us because, despite the fact that other Select Committees have done excellent work on both hate crime and internet safety, we found that the voices of disabled people were often not heard, and that became even clearer to us as the inquiry proceeded.

We found that rather puzzling; after all, disabled people are more likely to be in contact with a range of services—from council services to the Department for Work and Pensions and the health service. They therefore should be easy to contact, although, as one of our witnesses said:

“We’re not hard to reach, only easy to ignore.”

That leads to a misunderstanding of what disabled people are facing online, and what their problems really are.

When we asked both the technology companies and the Minister questions about disabled people, we often got answers about children. The Government’s Green Paper on internet safety said very little about the experiences of disabled people. When we raised that with the Minister, she kindly wrote to us in April last year saying that the Government planned to hold a roundtable with disability organisations and social media companies. The only problem with that is that the inquiry closed in December 2017.

Most disabled people are not children; they are adults who are able to make their own choices and decisions, and they deserve to have their voices heard. What we found out when talking to them was truly shocking. Disabled people are less likely to use the internet than the majority of the population but, among those who do, many are avid users. To be frank, the internet has been a boon to many disabled people. It has allowed them to connect with others with similar conditions, which is very important, especially if they have a rare condition. It has allowed them to widen their social circle, progress in their careers, organise, campaign and challenge stereotypes. However, while doing that, they face the most horrendous abuse—not occasionally, but day in, day out.

Such abuse is, frankly, a stain on our society. Disabled people are regularly told that they should have been aborted. They are targeted with requests for explicit images—the implication being that disabled women, in particular, ought to be grateful for any attention. They are told that they are benefit scroungers or fraudsters, and a drain on our society. That leads to a culture of fear among many disabled people who post about their lives online.

Oral Answers to Questions

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tracey Crouch]

That is a question from my hon. Friend that I can agree with.

It was a pleasure to meet the mixed ability sports rugby team about 18 months ago to discuss their tournament in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and I was pleased by their success over the summer recess. I would, of course, be happy to meet them again, and him, to discuss taking this forward.

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

18. Will the Minister join me in congratulating the England team who took part in the women’s rugby world cup in Ireland over the summer? I watched them play and they were magnificent.The organisation Sports Coach UK has said that one reason for lower participation rates in physical activity among black, Asian and minority ethnic women and girls, and women and girls in general, is that women are under-represented in coaching. What further steps are the Government prepared to take to provide tailored and targeted support to help to develop women coaches from BAME communities?

[Tracey Crouch]

I am happy to join the hon. Lady in congratulating the England women’s rugby team, and also, of course, the England women’s cricket team, who won the world cup as well. I was a coach in an all-girls football club, but I was the only female coach at that club, so I completely understand the point that she has made. The sports strategy sets out, very carefully, our wish to see more female coaches. We need to ensure that mums who take their kids to sports events become involved, rather than just cheering the kids on in the background, and we have tried to address that through the implementation of the sports strategy.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Solicitor General]

The hon. Lady is right to look in detail at regional variations. Overall, progress is still encouraging: the conviction rate for all strands of hate crime increased slightly again last year, and the number of hate-crime prosecutions has now reached record levels—it is in excess of 15,000. The answer to her question lies in the sharing of best practice among different regions. Earlier, I talked about engagement with the trans community in the north-east, and there are examples from other regions of how, if we work closely with the communities, we can increase conviction rates. In the hon. Lady’s area, work with disability communities has resulted in improved disability hate-crime prosecutions.

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

Earlier this year, the Kantor Centre identified an 11% increase in anti-Semitic abuse in the UK, much of which is driven by online and social media-based abuse. I am sure the whole House would want to condemn anti-Semitic abuse, but we need to do much more to tackle it, to prosecute it and to make it clear how unacceptable it is.

[The Solicitor General]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for raising the appalling crime of anti-Semitism. It is on the rise and it is not acceptable. We all need to speak out together to stamp it out. I am glad to say that the CPS is now encouraging prosecutors to look into the wider community impact, particularly of online hate crime, when they assess whether or not to prosecute. The right hon. Lady is right, and if we tolerate it online, the culture will gradually change and anti-Semitism will become mainstream. We cannot allow that to happen.