Caroline Dinenage MP: speeches

Speeches

• 18 Jun 2025 · Crime and Policing Bill · Hansard source

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  I have a similar concern about mobility scooters. Obviously, they are a fabulous tool, enabling so many in our constituencies to get out and about, but the number of serious injuries caused by mobility scooters has gone up by nearly 60% in the last 10 years, and the number of fatalities has doubled. These heavy class 3 mobility scooters, which can go up to 8 mph and travel on the roads, are not subject to insurance rules and cannot be penalised under dangerous driving regulations. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is something the Government also need to consider very carefully? I would really love the Minister to look at whether there is any legislation that would be implementable in cases such as these.

• 18 Jun 2025 · Crime and Policing Bill · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak to new clause 121, which is tabled in my name and supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns) and, I am very pleased to say, by Members from both sides of this Chamber. It would extend the definition of extreme pornography to include depictions of non-fatal strangulation, known as NFS. NFS was made a criminal offence in 2021 under the last Government, not because we think the Government should necessarily stick their nose into what people want to get up to in the bedroom, but because abusers use non-fatal strangulation without consent, as it leaves little visible injury and makes it hard to prosecute under domestic abuse cases. When a woman dies from strangulation, it is becoming increasingly common to use the defence that it was a sex game gone wrong. Non-fatal strangulation has a life out there in the world of online porn. As we know, the UK is a large porn consumer. In any given month, more than 10 million adults in the UK will access online porn, and the vast majority of them will be chaps. That is up to them—we do not judge—but we know from research that online porn is so widespread that one in 10 children have seen it by the age of nine. Unfortunately, it is the guide that many young people use to learn about sex. That is why I am extremely worried that non-fatal strangulation has been found to be rife on porn sites. Evidence has shown that it is directly influencing the sexual behaviour of young men, who are non-consensually strangling young women during consensual sex. Recent polling has suggested that 17% of 16 to 34-year-olds have been strangled without giving consent during consensual sex. We are not being prudes in calling for this misogynistic act to be banned in online porn. Health experts warn that there is no way to strangle someone without risk, given that blood and airflow may both be restricted. A person can become unconscious within 10 seconds of being choked, and within 17 seconds they can have a seizure due to lack of oxygen. Death can occur within 150 seconds of being rendered unconscious. Almost 20% of the women killed in the UK since 2014 were strangled by an intimate partner. Perpetrators who choke their partners are seven times more likely to kill them. I am sure the Minister will agree that it is alarming to hear reports of young men and boys seeking advice on how they can safely strangle their partner in bed and that girls are expected to accept that kind of behaviour. There was even a report last year, which the Minister may have heard about, of draft personal, social, health and economic education guidance from a Welsh local authority including safe choking during sex for a child sex education class. We need to send a signal that strangling your partner in bed is not safe—it can be a precursor to coercive, abusive behaviour. I know that the Government also want to send that signal, because in February they said, in their response to an independent review commissioned by the previous Government: “The government will take urgent action to ensure pornography platforms, law enforcement and prosecutors are taking all necessary steps to tackle this increasingly prevalent harm.” I therefore urge the Minister to support my new clause 121, which sets out one of the necessary steps referred to in the Government’s response. We need to back this amendment, ban this harmful practice, and send out a very strong message that depictions of non-fatal strangulation in porn normalise something that is not normal and is not safe.

• 13 Jun 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am addressing new clause 13, which provides the strict regulation of life-ending substances and self-administering devices. That means there will be transparency about what substances are used and how they are stored, prescribed and delivered. We owe it to patients, clinicians and the public to ensure that every part of the process is governed by clinical standards and ethical safeguards. For those physically unable to swallow or self-ingest, the new clause ensures that devices to support self-administration can be safely used. Without that, we risk creating a system that excludes some of the very people it is meant to support. While we must regulate the system properly, we must also reject amendments that would undermine or stall the Bill’s delivery. Amendment 19 proposes adding suicide prevention, the Mental Health Act and deprivation of liberty safeguards to the code of practice. As the Minister who put much of that legislation through, those are really important topics for me, but this is not the legislation to address them. Let us keep the code focused on the Bill’s core function of ensuring a safe, consistent and compassionate assisted dying process. Amendment 20 would allow non-adherence to the code to be used in civil or criminal proceedings. That is not appropriate. Guidance is meant to help professionals navigate difficult decisions, not become a legal trap. If clinicians act negligently, existing law already applies. We should not be creating new liabilities for those acting in good faith in very difficult conditions. I also oppose amendments 97 and 27, which would require the MHRA to license drugs specifically for assisted dying and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to recommend them. That would make the Bill unworkable.

• 14 May 2025 · Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  Yesterday the Minister appeared before our Select Committee and said, “The best kind of AI is the kind of AI that is built on premium content, and you can’t get premium content without paying for premium content.” Now, as well as being concerned about the overuse of the expression “premium content” in that sentence, I am also concerned about the fact that, as we speak, there are copyright works out there being scraped underhandedly by AI developers, some of whom are feigning licensing negotiations with the very rights holders whose works they are scraping. Surely now is the time to require developers to tell us what copyright works are being used to train their models and what their web-scraping bots are up to. Surely he agrees that Lords amendment 49 is a very good way to move this forward to see what works are being used to train AI models.

• 12 Nov 2024 · Tackling Image-based Abuse · Hansard source

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  It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I thank the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) for tabling such an important debate, and she made some really powerful points. I declare an interest: being very elderly, at one stage I was the Minister for Women and Equalities, and I was responsible for bringing forward the Revenge Porn Helpline. When that legislation came through, I was hopeful that that vital resource would be something temporary, and that one day it would be abolished because we did not need it any more. In actual fact, quite the opposite is true: it is busier than ever. As the hon. Member for Bolton North East said, it is catching some terrible perpetrators of the most horrific online abuse. I was also the Minister for Digital and Culture who held the baton for a couple of years on the Online Safety Act 2023. I hope that legislation will offer more protection for the victims of this humiliating crime, which, as we know, disproportionately affects women. But technology moves so fast. I am concerned that, despite the protections in the Act and the Revenge Porn Helpline, the emergence of deepfakes in particular has opened up a new front in the war on women—I say that because 99% of pornographic images and deepfakes are of women. Literally tens of millions of deepfake images are being produced every year, most of them sexual, as the hon. Member for Bolton North East said. The fact that the use of nudification apps and the creation of ultra-realistic deepfake porn for private use is still legal, and worse, becoming more popular, is a war on women’s autonomy. It is a war on our dignity, and a war on our identity. The creation of these unpleasant sexual or nude deepfakes serves to push us out of those spaces and to undermine and silence us, both online and offline. We must do everything we can to stand against it. I am sure the Minister agrees that we owe a debt to my noble Friend Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge for her work to legislate in this area. She encountered some hate of her own when she was appointed to the other place—she was too young and too female—but her very presence there indicates exactly why we need young women in both Houses to stand up against these injustices and bring them to the fore. I hope the Minister will do everything in her power to see my noble Friend’s fantastic Bill become law.