Protecting Children Online

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. By a happy co-incidence I received an e-mail at 12.35 pm announcing that Google is increasing its contribution to the IWF to £1 million.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend spoke about the number of reported cases. As an Internet Watch Foundation champion, I went into every one of my primary schools, spoke to the 10 and 11-year-olds at every one of those schools, and asked those children how many of them had seen indecent images online. Every child in every class had been exposed to such material. Is that not a national disgrace?

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is obviously doing great work in her constituency and what she says is truly shocking. It is confirmed by the statistics which the NSPCC has been collecting.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

The House finds itself today debating an incredibly important issue, and one that has risen in prominence because of the worst of circumstances. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) referred at the beginning of her speech to the dreadful murders of Tia Sharp and April Jones, which shocked the nation and saddened all who read about them. They reinforce the need to take action and maintain vigilance.

This Government, and indeed the previous Government, take the continued availability of child sexual abuse images online extremely seriously. If I heard the hon. Lady correctly, she said that we should not refer to this as child pornography. She is quite right: it is child abuse, child torture and child rape. The creation of these images is abuse against a child, and that child is further violated every time the image is circulated and viewed by others. That is why the creation, distribution and viewing of child sexual abuse images is strictly prohibited in this country, and why we take action to stop it. We must take every possible step to prevent their production and distribution over the internet.

We must work together on that. We must recognise that that means using industry, law enforcement and the charitable sector. I think that we have made considerable progress. Let me start by talking about the Internet Watch Foundation. Before the IWF was established in 1996, this country hosted around 18% of the known child sexual abuse content on the internet, which is absolutely shocking. Since 2003, the IWF, working with industry, has reduced that figure to less than 1%. We fully support and welcome the work done by the internet industry in the UK, which uses a list provided by the IWF to block images of child sexual abuse. Blocking has a real and tangible benefit, as it stops people inadvertently viewing the images and stops paedophiles arguing that they found the images accidentally.

The IWF has a crucial role to play in the removal of these images from the internet. At the summit that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has called for next week, we will discuss what further measures we can take. It is right and proper that we look at the role and funding levels of the IWF, and at what more the industry can do in terms of its role and scope.

[Mrs Moon]

The IWF does a fantastic job, but it can only do as good a job as the referrals it receives. When I speak to parents and children in my constituency, they do not know what to do. Often, the advice given to children is “Turn the computer off.” That will not help us to track down images and stop them coming in in the first place.

[Mr Vaizey]

I thank the hon. Lady for that contribution and pay tribute to her for the work that she does on these issues in this House and throughout the country. She is absolutely right. There is more we can do, and we need to look at a number of issues that will be raised at the summit next week.

First, we need to discuss the funding of the IWF. I note the £1 million contribution that Google has made this afternoon. We will discuss with the IWF what kind of funding it needs and what funding needs to come from the industry to help it to do the work that it needs to do. Secondly, we need to discuss the IWF’s role in peer-to-peer file-sharing. It is all very well, and absolutely right, to clamp down on and block the sites that host these vile and disgusting images, but we need to do more work on the activities of peer-to-peer networks where people are sharing them.

This involves the complex issue of how the IWF works with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. We have to clear the lines on that. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland referred to international work. We, as a Government, support the Global Alliance against Child Sexual Abuse Online, which covers more than 40 countries. Both CEOP and the IWF work internationally, and it is extremely important to focus on that work. We can be proud of our success in this regard, but, as she rightly points out, the problem remains one of images posted abroad.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona O'Donnell]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I confess that that is well beyond my level of knowledge. In this day and age we must at least challenge the issue, and I am grateful that the Government have called a summit next week, which will be a great opportunity. I hope we give a clear steer and that there will be time scales for internet service providers as well. I confess freely to the hon. Gentleman that I do not have the answer to his question, but we must set that challenge and tell the sector that it must get its house in order. It is clear that we must do more.

Not so long ago, we in this House took the decision to make it illegal to carry a child in a car without them being safely secured in an appropriate way. At this time I think there is a greater risk to children’s safety from accessing the internet than from getting into a car, and if we can intervene in such circumstances that will be absolutely in order. It is early in the debate but I am glad that so far we have not heard talk of the nanny state. We must act on this matter to keep children safe.

[Mrs Moon]

When I went into schools around Bridgend I took two leaflets—one for parents and one for children—about staying safe online. They were seen by Dr Tanya Byron, and agreed with Google and local head teachers so that the content was accurate. It was clear that parents did not have the technical savvy; their children were wiser than them and knew how to remove the constraints, which is why we need such constraints put in place by providers rather than by parents. Children can remove their parent’s constraints.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point; children are often well ahead of the adults who are supervising them. I do not know whether the Government have any plans to involve children in the summit and this process. Children were part of the consultation, but what opportunities will the Government provide to allow them to be part of the debate? When I went into a local primary school I found that the children’s knowledge was well in advance of mine, and from my experience as a parent I know that children can be canny in finding ways round things that we are perhaps not aware of—