Digital Exploitation of Women and Girls

Joe Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Sir Mark Hendrick) for securing this debate. It could not be timelier, because today represents a significant day for the constituency and community that I represent.

Three years ago, Holly Newton lost her life at the hands of her ex-boyfriend in Hexham. She was a much-loved daughter, granddaughter and sister, a loving friend and a talented dancer. She was just 15 years old. Her ex-boyfriend had become increasingly obsessed, coercive and controlling in the lead-up to her murder, attempting to isolate her from friends and relentlessly bombarding her. Three years ago, he used Snapchat to track her movements before fatally stabbing her. The exploitation of technology was used as one of a range of tools to abuse Holly and ultimately to end her life.

Devastatingly for her family, this abhorrent act of violence against Holly and the abuse that preceded it are not recognised as domestic violence, as Holly was under the age of 16. Micala, Holly’s mother, experienced a horrifyingly similar lack of support or acknowledgment of her own experience of domestic abuse as a teenager. Without recognition for domestic abuse victims under the age of 16, the system will continue to fail children across the country.

I support the family and the campaign for Holly’s law, which would change the age of recognition and the development of relationship education for all young people. It is a critical flaw that we are not legally recognising victims when we know that they exist and that perpetrators in the realm of digital exploitation and abuse are themselves increasingly under the age of 16 or 18. I thank the Minister for the time she took to meet us last week, when we discussed the next steps for the campaign and addressed potential routes to reform.

Technology is being weaponised against women and girls at a speed that far outpaces our systems to safeguard and support victims, prosecute perpetrators and intervene in cases before warning signs escalate into fatalities. I want to touch briefly on a case that my office has been working on with another constituent for well over a year. Not only has she suffered the most appalling digital violation, but she has been a victim of systemic flaws when it comes to this form of abuse. She discovered that her partner had spent several years taking non-consensual intimate photographic images of her and had posted them to websites and forums online. He was arrested, but while he was in custody he refused to share the PIN to access his device.

The investigating force did not have the technology required to effectively review the device, which was key to the perpetrator’s activity. It had no way to prove where the non-consensual images came from or prove their existence with any electronic footprint on the suspect’s devices. With only circumstantial evidence based on who had access to the images, and with the suspect denying the accusations against him, the police could not meet the evidential threshold required for the CPS to charge. After being released, he was free to go straight back into the community, holding the very device that could be used to further perpetrate abuse, which he did. He turned to AI nudification apps to continue to produce non-consensual imagery of the victim and cover his digital tracks in the process.

Investigation resources, appropriate technologies and the boundaries of the evidential threshold have all conspired against this innocent woman whose life has been devastated by digital and domestic abuse. I urge the Minister to look proactively at a cross-departmental approach to ensuring that our commitment to tackling digital exploitation is effective and addresses the systemic gaps.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Oral Answers to Questions

Joe Morris Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

We have provided an additional £200 million for neighbourhood policing as part of more than £1 billion of additional funding for police forces across the country. That is how we are putting an additional 3,000 neighbourhood police officers and police community support officers on our streets this year, after the decimation of neighbourhood policing under the Conservatives.

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

T5.   I associate myself with the Home Secretary’s comments on 7/7. Recently, the town of Prudhoe was shocked when Islamophobic graffiti was found on a building. Such graffiti has no place in Prudhoe, my constituency, Northumberland or this country. Can the Home Secretary assure me that upholding the safety and security of everyone in rural communities, no matter where they are from or what their background, is of the utmost importance to this Government?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. That sort of graffiti and serious hate crime divides communities and needs to be taken seriously by police across the country. It is one of the reasons we are strengthening the law to give the police stronger powers to prevent intimidating protests around not just synagogues but mosques.

Oral Answers to Questions

Joe Morris Excerpts

Monday 2nd June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

The Online Safety Act 2023 will require tech companies to take measures to prevent fraudulent content on their platforms or face significant fines. Under the Act, the largest firms will be required to do all they can to prevent fraudulent advertising from appearing on their platforms.

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

8. What steps her Department is taking to help tackle violence against women and girls.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)]

We are already taking significant steps to make sure that violence against women and girls is treated as the national emergency that it is. That includes launching our domestic abuse protection orders, and investing almost £20 million this year in specialist services for victims and in projects to help prevent VAWG and improve our response to it. Later this year, we will publish our cross-Government VAWG strategy, which will set out our long-term plan to tackle the crisis.

[Joe Morris]

For some families of victims, further review of release decisions can provide some solace, but it cannot do so for my constituent Doreen Soulsby. Her daughter’s murderer was released before the Victims and Courts Bill passed through this place. Will the Minister meet Doreen and me to discuss clause 61 of the Bill and the release of life prisoners?

[Jess Phillips]

Yes, of course. As my hon. Friend knows, I have had a strong bond with Doreen for many years. Of course I would be delighted to meet him and her.

Rural Depopulation

Joe Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz; I will be brief.

I applied to contribute to this debate because I wanted to speak not just about my experiences, but about the experiences of people I grew up around, people I was at school with and people who, in many cases, were forced to leave my constituency of Hexham, which colleagues will be surprised to learn is the largest in England. As the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) spoke about the beauty of his constituency, I feel compelled to remind people of the beauty of my constituency, which is in the county of Hadrian’s Wall, and to note that we will be marking the anniversary of the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree during the conference recess later in September.

When I go through so many towns and villages in my constituency, I see that they are marked by exactly what Members have spoken about today: a lack of younger people, who have been forced—they have not chosen—to move away. They have been forced, by a lack of jobs and opportunities, to seek to make their lives elsewhere, often leaving behind families and caring responsibilities, which means large amounts of travel back home to meet those obligations. The last Government failed to grapple with this issue, which we know is a huge, inherited, generational and demographic challenge, and one that I urge our Government to take on fully.

I spoke to some of the businesses in my constituency on the campaign trail. They want to take on more people, but they simply cannot find the skills they need or people who want to work and can afford to live in such an overheated and over-inflated housing market. That leads to a decline for those businesses and, for some of them, a slow death. One of the larger employers told me during the election that if they take on someone and train them up, but then they cannot afford to live in my constituency and move somewhere else, they bear all the training costs, only to see that individual go and work in a far more urban part of the country. We have spoken a lot about the rural premium and the rural cost of living, but there is a rural cost of doing business as well, which we should note very carefully.

As the representative for the Hexham constituency—the first Labour representative for the constituency—and as someone who was privileged to be out knocking on doors with my school friends and my schoolteachers, I know that we are not just letting our young people down, but letting our older generations down. I am privileged to be able to go back to visit my grandma every week when I am back in the constituency, but I have friends who now live three or four hours away and are unable to do the same. This is having a genuinely devastating impact on a lot of families, particularly given the acute social care crisis that this Government have inherited.

Ultimately, only by addressing this issue and the really biting crisis of rural depopulation can we turn our communities around and ensure that they can become the thriving engines of growth that the economy needs them to be.