Jess Asato MP: speeches

Speeches

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

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  I recognise that the situation facing my hon. Friend’s constituent is awful, but we are here today to balance such situations with the choices of people who may not be loved as dearly as him. Our concerns would be about the fact that many of these killings could be mercy killings, and if there is no recourse to the coroner, some people may be taking their own lives under coercion and pressure that may never be discovered, because the full law will not be applied.

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

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  Last weekend my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) posted on X a story of two older people who wanted to die together, and who had found doctors to sign off their assisted death. Is my hon. Friend concerned that this debate might be romanticising suicide pacts given that, as we know, there are mercy killings, which are, unfortunately, actual deaths? Does he share the fears of the Government’s suicide adviser that the Bill will undermine suicide prevention efforts?

• 3 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  A family court judge who would have made decisions in relation to many abused children was recently found guilty by the High Court of abusing their own adopted children. Does the Minister agree that protecting the anonymity of members of the judiciary who have abused their children, particularly when it relates so intimately to their own work in court, risks undermining public trust in our legal system?

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  Does the Lord Chancellor agree that the voluntary and community sector can play a vital role in supporting offenders to rehabilitate and gain vital employment and housing? Organisations such as Pathways Care Farm and Access Community Trust in my constituency have helped to prevent t reoffending.

• 20 May 2025 · Victims and Courts Bill · Hansard source

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  I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley), and to Cheryl and her family for their fight for justice. Having worked with both adult and child victims of traumatic abuse, I was glad to stand last year on a manifesto that committed to reforming the system to put the needs of victims first, and to ensure they get the support they need and deserve. This Bill is part of that mission. I am pleased that it strengthens victims’ rights, forces offenders to attend sentencing hearings, and empowers the Victims’ Commissioner to do more to stand up for victims and hold public bodies to account where there are failings. Nevertheless, there are three areas in which I believe we should go further and faster. First, we know that victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence are faced with a postcode lottery when it comes to accessing specialist support. They are left at the mercy of the various budgetary decisions made by each area’s police and crime commissioner, local authority and health bodies.

• 20 May 2025 · Victims and Courts Bill · Hansard source

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  I believe that all police and crime commissioners ought to fund those services—hopefully the Minister can respond to that point. It is clearly outrageous that any victim of sexual violence should be left without any service at all. Where specialist domestic abuse services do exist, they are faced with a deeply precarious financial situation that is severely hampering the ability of victims to access the support they need. Fewer than half of victims and survivors are able to access the community-based support they want. Without that support, some victims may be unable to leave domestic abuse perpetrators, or may return to them when they find it too difficult to escape their controlling behaviour. In 2022, only 7% of victims who wanted their perpetrator to receive support to change their behaviour and stop reoffending were able to get that, and recent research undertaken by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has found that 27% of services are having to turn away child victims from vital support due to a lack of capacity. For those reasons, I believe this legislation needs to include a statutory duty to commission specialist domestic abuse and sexual violence services based in the community for both adult and child victims. It is a stain on our nation that victims of the most unimaginable trauma do not have a right to support after abuse. A new statutory duty would also allow us to create parity with the accommodation-based services that were introduced by the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, so that community-based services are given the same legislative protection. Secondly, I believe that the parents and carers of victims of serious sexual and violent crimes also require support as third-party victims. A campaign on this issue has been led by Cath Pickles, the chief executive officer of Restitute, an amazing local charity that supports third-party victims. These crimes fracture families and support networks, and those who are left to care for primary victims often develop their own mental health issues and may even have to give up work. There are mothers who must face picking up the pieces after the sexual abuse of their child, and families who have to support domestic abuse victims as they fight for justice. We should look to include them in the scope of the support available to victims, because the impact of abuse does not just harm the primary victim, but can destroy the victim’s family too. Finally, I recognise that we must not risk a very welcome step forward with potential legal challenges, but I believe we ought to look again having at a stricter definition for the purpose of depriving people of parental responsibility, especially where there is a risk to the child. Many will simply not comprehend how the serious sexual abuse of a child is compatible with the right to family life. What about the child’s right to live a life free from harm? I hope that the Government are willing to work with me, and with others, to tighten that aspect, among others that I have mentioned, as the Bill progresses through the House.

• 16 May 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  Will my hon. Friend distance herself from the correspondence from Dame Esther Rantzen, who accused those of us who have concerns about the Bill of having undeclared religious beliefs? Many colleagues found that distasteful and disrespectful.

• 16 May 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Member mentioned that the person is autonomous and should be protected from inquiries about them, but what if they are not autonomous because they are being coercively controlled by a partner? What if that partner has prevented them from reaching out to their family to let them know that they are going to take an assisted death? Would it not be a great safeguard to ensure that the panel and all the doctors around them had ascertained that the family had been told?

• 16 May 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  The shadow Minister says that we are debating those amendments today, but we have not actually been able to hear from all those who have tabled those amendments. Nine Members who have tabled amendments have not been called to speak, so how can we call this a debate when we have not even heard why they are proposing their amendments in the first place?

• 24 Apr 2025 · Public Service Reform · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for his response. I have been contacted by a constituent who is concerned for his poorly elderly father, who requires cryotherapy. That service used to be offered at his local GP, avoiding a difficult trip to our local hospital, which would have a deleterious impact on his father’s already poor health. Given the Government’s focus on moving more health services into the community and people’s homes as part of our public service reform agenda, does my right hon. Friend agree that cryotherapy services should be considered as part of that welcome shift?

• 24 Apr 2025 · Public Service Reform · Hansard source

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  10. What steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to reform public services.

• 17 Mar 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak in support of new clause 8 in my name, which has the support of many colleagues across the House and organisations including the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, Barnardo’s, the NSPCC and the Children’s Commissioner for England. I am grateful to the hon. Members for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) and for Woking (Mr Forster) for their comments in today’s debate. New clause 8 would amend section 58 of the Children Act 2004 to remove the “reasonable punishment” defence that permits assault and battery on children by parents and carers. Children in Scotland and Wales already have the same protections as adults when it comes to being hit, but we find ourselves in the peculiar situation where a child growing up just over the border in England has fewer rights. Why should they? What is the difference between a child growing up in Berwick-upon-Tweed and a child in Bonnyrigg? Scotland and Wales are not alone: 67 countries around the world have already banned physical punishment—Tajikistan last year became the latest—and 27 others have also committed to a ban. There is a global recognition that children deserve better. Indeed, as part of the UK’s commitment to the 16th Sustainable Development Goal, we have already pledged to end all violence against children, and that includes physical punishment in the home. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has stated unequivocally that protection from physical punishment is a basic human right of a child. Physical punishment is not punishment; it is abuse. We have a wealth of research to draw on from the last 30 years, and not a single reputable study has found that physical punishment positively impacts children’s development. There is no evidence to show that it improves behaviour in children. The reality is that physical punishment does not establish in a child’s mind a difference between right and wrong; it simply evokes fear—a fear of violence and pain. We know that children who are physically punished are at a far higher risk of experiencing maltreatment and abuse by parents, because over time parents may feel the need to escalate and inflict more and more pain to elicit the same response. A 16-year-old girl told Childline: “When I was younger and misbehaved, my mum gave me a warning and put me on the naughty step. Then when I got to five to 12 years old, it was a tap or a little smack. But now it can be a proper smack, or there was one occasion where she pulled my hair and I fell to the floor and she continuously hit me. I don’t want to get mum in trouble, but I can’t carry on being afraid of her.” Studies have also found that physical punishment leads to higher levels of aggression directed against parents by their children. Violence begets violence, and teaching children from a young age that violence is an acceptable way of channelling stress and frustration has consequences for all of us in society. It also has a pronounced impact on the children themselves. We know from research conducted by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health that children who are physically punished are almost three times more likely to experience mental health problems than those who are not. We know that physical punishment of children is linked to substance misuse, antisocial behaviour and slower cognitive development. While the majority of parents do not use physical punishment and its use is declining, more than one in five 10-year-olds have still experienced it. New clause 8 is not about criminalising parents. No one wants to stop a parent from protecting their child who is about to reach for a hot kettle or cross a busy road. Of the many countries that have introduced a ban, there has been no evidence that it has led to an increase in prosecutions. Instead, changing the law is about giving parents, children and professionals clarity, while improving the toolbox parents have to positively raise their child. New clause 8 removes the ambiguity created by the “reasonable punishment” defence and will allow children and adults to come forward more readily to report abuse. A clearer legal framework also makes it easier for professionals like social workers to do their jobs in the best interests of children. New clause 8 will not, on its own, be able to stop cases like Sara Sharif’s, but it will certainly ensure that the threat of violence many children face will no longer be given the pretence of legal cover. We cannot afford to delay action. The NSPCC has seen a threefold increase in the number of child welfare calls mentioning physical punishment in the past couple of years. We need to act now to ban physical punishment, so we can ensure that children can grow up free from abuse and harm, something I know is a priority for this Government and is the purpose of the Bill in front of us. Evidence from other countries shows us that bans work. In Germany, for example, the percentage of young people subjected to physical punishment fell from 30% to 3% after it introduced a ban in 2002. Given that 71% of adults believe that physical punishment is unacceptable, it seems to me that sooner or later we will have to change the law. My challenge with new clause 8 is: why not sooner? Why do we not commit to ending this abuse today? Children will not thank us for waiting. Future generations will not look kindly on our inaction, nor should they. We have the evidence, the power and the time. We have the ability to act and we should to protect all our children.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a proud member of the trade unions USDAW, Unison and GMB, and I am also proud to have worked at a domestic abuse charity for six years. That is why I rise today to speak in support of new clause 22, which I have tabled with the support of colleagues from across the House. I am an officer of the all-party parliamentary group on domestic violence and abuse, the secretariat of which is ably provided by Women’s Aid. I have tabled this new clause following evidence presented to the APPG, with the drafting support of the law firm Hogan Lovells.

• 7 Mar 2025 · Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the Minister. Social media is fuelling the rise of extremist misogyny online and normalising harassment and violence against women and girls in real life. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Rosie Wrighting) so bravely recounted in this place yesterday, we are not immune to that in this place. Some 90% of girls say they have been sent an explicit picture or video. The New Britain Project, More in Common and the National Education Union recently ran a focus group in my constituency with parents about their children’s access to smartphones. In the group, a mother spoke of how her daughter was so regularly sent dick pics that, by the age of 15, she was used to drawing a little sombrero on the picture, sending it back and blocking the sender. The mother said: “No child that age should be seeing male penises. It is quite traumatic, isn’t it, for a kid to be witnessing that kind of thing? But it is everywhere.” Children should not be forced to find a way to cope—with funny pictures—because something incessantly traumatises them. We would not accept our children being flashed in the streets, so why is it different online? Why do we not expect the tech companies to act? Their products allow this to happen to our children all day, every day, yet we still do not have any movement from them. We know that the problem is only getting worse, particularly with the use of Al and the rise of nude deepfakes. Thankfully, the Government are now taking strong action on deepfakes, but I urge them to go further by considering age verification for app stores, so that our young people know that when they access app stores, the content is right for their age and level of development. Online sexual crimes committed against children have risen by 400% since 2013. A generation is growing up chronically online, raised by the internet, and we cannot stand idly by in the name of freedom or freedom of speech. There is no freedom in addiction, in being harmed or in children being underdeveloped because they have not experienced socialisation, the great outdoors, the pleasure of books, or simply not being harmed by being sent horrible things that they should not have to see. Children in the online world are taught to look up to role models with unhealthy opinions, unrealistic beauty standards and conspicuous wealth beyond their dreams. Children are being marketed to and sold to, all day, every day. When they cannot afford or look like what they see, they feel worthless. Children are cyber-bullied. They are exposed to content that encourages self-harm and competitive anorexia, and romanticises suicide. That has already caused untold harm for parents who have seen their children take their own lives after engaging with such material. Our children are becoming infected by an epidemic of loneliness. At some point, we in this place have to say, “Enough is enough.” As a parent of young children, I know that parents cannot and should not be expected to do this alone; we need a decisive legal and cultural shift that reclaims childhood for the real world. Every month there is a “How to detox from social media” article about taking ourselves away from toxic social media—just like how to detox after Christmas. We read that content as adults, because we also struggle to stop looking at social media, so why do we expect our children to exercise self-control that we ourselves do not have? The UK must follow countries such as Australia by raising the age of online consent from 13 to 16. Some 55% of Gen Z and 86% of parents in the UK support that idea, and 130,000 people recently signed a petition on the UK Parliament website to that effect. I also believe that we need to create a new watershed of social norms by banning smartphones at school. Too many of the headteachers I speak to who are doing the right thing by banning smartphones in their schools tell me that they get complaints from students and parents who see that other schools do things differently. It makes it harder for parents to enforce rules and norms in their own homes when they cannot point to principles that the whole country adheres to.

• 7 Mar 2025 · Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am incredibly grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. That is very true. We have seen a huge 40% increase in the use of strangulation of women in sexual relationships, and there is much to suggest that this is related to more and more young people watching strangulation in pornography online. That is another subject, but I would definitely like to see that go as well. It is really important that the commencement of age verification in the Online Safety Act, which was introduced by the previous Government and supported by those on the Labour Front Bench at the time, must be upheld and to the most robust standards. I look forward to the Minister saying that that is exactly what the Government will do.

• 7 Mar 2025 · Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill · Hansard source

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  Of course I join my hon. Friend in those remarks. Parents and future generations will not forgive us if we do not act swiftly. In the Government’s assessment under clause 3, I hope that we will finally see a recognition that the status quo is not working for children or parents and that radical action is needed. Only then can we work to ensure that children can grow up and develop without trauma, without harm and without being addicted to being harmed and traumatised. This Bill gets us closer to that, and I am happy to support it.

• 7 Mar 2025 · Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) for the huge amount of work that he has put into this legislation. I am proud to be a co-sponsor of the Bill, in support of his tireless efforts in this area, his leadership and his lifelong commitment to safeguarding children from harm. Over the past six months, the Bill has been a lightning rod for the conversation about children’s access to smartphones and social media. The Bill does not mark the end of that conversation; rather, it marks the start of a national debate on what childhood in the online age should look like. I am glad that the Government have positively engaged with the Bill and that, through this legislation, we can now see a path towards ensuring that we give children the best possible, and crucially the least harmful, start in life. Between 2017 and 2021, there was a 60% increase in the number of children with a probable mental health condition, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and body dysmorphia. The impact was particularly acute for young women, as many have mentioned. Screen time also has links to poor physical health outcomes, such as childhood obesity. I was particularly concerned to learn, in one of the hearings on my hon. Friend’s Bill, about data linking screen use to shortsightedness and worse eye health. A report from the College of Optometrists in 2023 found that cases of myopia among children aged five to 16 have risen by 12% over the last five years in the UK. Heavy smartphone use also impacts sleep patterns and the ability to fall and stay asleep—as many of us will know. One study found that children are 79% less likely to get the recommended eight hours of sleep if they use their phones. That clearly has an effect on their attainment and life outcomes. Indeed, four in 10 teenagers admit that their smartphone is distracting them from schoolwork. Clause 1 requires the UK chief medical officer to publish advice for parents and carers on the use of smart phones and social media by children, which we welcome. This is particularly key because the issue of young people’s smartphones and social media requires a public health focus, as has been argued. We know that almost all children have a smartphone by the age of 15 and that, as my hon. Friend said, it is vulnerable children who are spending significantly longer on their phones. It is our duty in this place to protect children, who are vulnerable, and the most vulnerable children. For almost a quarter of children, smartphone use has become a behavioural addiction, and that is not accidental. Tech companies have created products without the input of child development experts, and we know this because they told us that they did not have any child development experts on their product boards when they came to a session organised by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington. These algorithms seek to get young people hooked before they can even properly comprehend it, and like a drug, they keep coming back for more. Children have sadly lost a love of reading, with levels at their lowest in the UK among our children, and of the outdoors. As Jonathan Haidt argues in his book “The Anxious Generation”, childhood has ceased to be play-based and has become phone-based. This simultaneous over-protectiveness offline and under-protectiveness online has created a perfect storm for inhibiting children’s development. For example, we are witnessing a marked increase in referrals for delayed speech and language abilities. There are now pram adaptations for babies and toddlers to watch smartphones, rather than learning from the stimulus of the real world around them. I hope that the chief medical officer’s remit extends to working with early childhood and speech and language organisations to issue guidance for parents in the very early years. The online world that we are sending our children out into is not a world we would send them out into in real life, and yet this is their real life. Children as young as seven are stumbling across and are currently freely able to access pornographic content online. The Children’s Commissioner found that one key area where children access pornography is, perhaps surprisingly, the social media platform X. Eight in 10 children have encountered violent pornography online by the age of 18, and that is having serious consequences, desensitising young boys and girls and warping their perceptions of healthy sex and relationships.

• 6 Mar 2025 · Public Procurement: Support for SMEs · Hansard source

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  Pathways Care Farm is an amazing charity in Lowestoft that supports people with disabilities, those with mental health issues and ex-offenders to get back on their feet by working with animals and growing food. The charity has excellent outcomes, particularly with helping people to get work-ready and improve their health, but it finds it hard to access opportunities for public contracts, such as social prescribing, because it is so small. Does the Minister agree that organisations in the voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors and charities such as Pathways have an important role to play in providing solutions for the public sector?

• 6 Mar 2025 · Public Procurement: Support for SMEs · Hansard source

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  17. What steps he is taking to support small and medium-sized enterprises in public procurement.

• 26 Feb 2025 · Online Safety Act: Implementation · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), the former Secretary of State, for securing today’s important debate. I am proud to have worked on the Online Safety Act alongside colleagues in the women’s and children’s sectors, and to have successfully pushed, in particular, for stronger age verification measures to stop children from accessing harmful pornography. Given the abundant harms within the online world and the detrimental impact they have on young people’s development, the need for strong regulation was aways going to be necessary. Tech companies have no incentive to care for children when their profit motives compel them to create addictive content, purposely designed to keep kids hooked. However, regulation is only ever as good as its ability to be enforced. It is clear from my conversations with those who care about children’s online safety that the regulator, Ofcom, needs to do better in many areas. Adequate regulation has never been needed more than now, in an era of a roll-back in online giants’ desires to protect and safeguard their users—from X to Meta—given changing political winds. Self-regulation has clearly failed and we must ensure that Ofcom’s implementation of the Online Safety Act is not loose enough to allow that to continue. I agree with the concerns raised by the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam; what we have seen so far from Ofcom demonstrates that Parliament needs to be doing more to ensure that its will is stamped on the regulatory framework that Ofcom has been forming. There are many areas where we need to go further. One of the most concerning trends online that we have witnessed has been the rise of extremist misogyny and a culture that incites violence against women and girls more generally. Last year, 77% of girls and young women aged seven to 21 experienced online harm; that includes things such as revenge porn, which affects one in 14 adults. The revenge porn helpline has experienced an average 57% increase in cases each year since it was founded a decade ago. It has also witnessed a 400% rise in cases involving deepfake images. AI is powering today’s misogyny and abuse and more must be done. That is why I have been campaigning for a ban on nudification apps that create deepfake pornography, by and large, of women and girls without their consent. Issues such as those need to be tackled now and not stewed over for another decade. I am concerned that Ofcom’s age assurance and children’s access codes of practice for part 5 providers—that is, dedicated pornography sites—do not include a clear and measurable definition of what highly effective age assurance means in practice. Without a stringent definition, pornography sites will likely shirk responsibility for implementing a robust system, and Ofcom’s ability to enforce action will be made more difficult. Moreover, we know that the Act did not look at content regulation. That is why we are all eagerly anticipating Baroness Bertin’s pornography review, which I believe is due to be published this week by the Government. Ensuring that online content is aligned with that of offline, regulated by the British Board of Film Classification, will be key. We must look to expand age assurance to the level of the app store. App stores were not included in the Online Safety Act. Indeed, Ofcom has been given two years to conduct a review into app stores. I strongly believe that that needs to be brought forward. App stores are not adequately ensuring that apps are age-appropriate, and more needs to be done to stop children downloading apps that can lead them to dark and harmful places. As a Parliament, we must be willing to bring forward legislation that complements and builds on the Online Safety Act, to ensure that Ofcom acts to protect our women and children.

• 12 Feb 2025 · Online Pornography: Regulation · Hansard source

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  Online pornography sites are awash with content that depicts sexual activity with children. Adult performers are made to look like children through props such as stuffed toys and school uniforms. Popular search tags include “homework”, “pigtails”, “teen” and “barely legal”, and the content is often particularly violent. Videos that depict incest such as sex between fathers and daughters and between brothers and sisters are also prevalent. Child protection experts warn that this content, which is illegal offline, sexualises children and is driving demand for child sexual abuse material. Does the Secretary of State agree that we need urgent action following the pornography review to equalise online and offline content regulation, to tackle violence against women and girls and shut down a gateway to paedophilic content?

• 12 Feb 2025 · Online Pornography: Regulation · Hansard source

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  6. What steps his Department is taking to ensure the regulation of online pornography content is aligned with offline regulation.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Child Arrangements: Presumption of Parental Involvement · Hansard source

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  One of my constituents, a domestic abuse survivor, has had all contact with her children removed, as well as her domestic abuse claim rejected without evidence. She has now had to pay not just for contact visits but monthly drug tests, when her drug use was not proven at all, making it completely unaffordable for her to see her children. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is past time that we stopped our family courts from being used as a tool of abuse against survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence?

• 13 Jan 2025 · Children’s Social Media Accounts · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I pay tribute to Ellen Roome’s steadfast campaign in the most awful, unimaginable circumstances, and to the campaigns of all the other bereaved parents who seek change so that no other parent has to suffer like they are. As citizens, parents and legislators, we are rightfully worried about what our children consume online. The recent Channel 4 programme “Swiped” demonstrated the addiction our children have, the concerns parents have about the time they spend online, and the harms that children continue to face. Before they are able to properly comprehend it, our children are sucked into the online world by algorithms that are designed to get them hooked and, as if it were a drug, they keep coming back for more. In this world, they are taught to look up to influencers with unhealthy opinions, unrealistic beauty standards and conspicuous wealth beyond their dreams. They are told that they are not good enough, they may be cyber-bullied by their peers for not being good enough, they have trouble sleeping and their attention span withers. We also know that short-sightedness is becoming more prevalent. Our children’s work suffers and they find it increasingly difficult to read and learn. Our children see pornography online before they receive high-quality sex and relationships education in school. They are shown adverts for apps that can use AI to nudify their peers and spread such images to their friends and around school. They are criminalised for doing that, but the tools they use remain legal and readily accessible. They get trapped in the whirlpool of online pornography and dragged into increasingly extreme and violent content. They become desensitised and their perceptions and expectations of sex and healthy relationships are warped. Online behaviours quickly become offline behaviours, such as self-harm, dangerous viral challenges and peer-on-peer sexual abuse, which do huge harm to mental health, so that one in five children now has a diagnosable mental health disorder. A generation of children chronically online and harmed by it bear the brunt of a technology that was never designed with children’s development in focus and that acts with no regard for the consequences of the harm it causes. When questioning tech companies recently, none of them could confirm that they develop products widely consumed by children with input from child development experts. I do not understand why we expect stringent standards in all other aspects of our children’s lives—their toys, cots and bikes, and our cars—and yet not on the impact of social media products. We cannot stand idly by in the name of freedom, because there is no freedom in addiction or in being harmed. We cannot let our children’s lives be dominated by the dangerous online world. Whether it is depression or misogyny, eating disorders or myopia, we are failing children by continuing to subject them, and those they interact with, to the impacts of a childhood spent online. We need to reclaim childhood for the real world. I recognise the important role of internet access in providing spaces for children to access support, but I wonder how we weigh up the harms caused through access to social media, which support services, mostly in the voluntary and community sector and our public services, need to mop up afterwards. We must look more at whether we could provide that access more safely in school settings or through youth services. I am very aware of the huge impact of abusive parents and carers, but it might be time for us to start asking whether we are using that as an excuse, rather than thinking about how we ensure our children can get the access they may need to get safe without also succumbing to the dangers of the online world. We fundamentally need to change the role the internet plays in growing up, and that must be a societal shift, given the pressure children and young people feel to be online. That is why I back Ellen Roome’s call for parental oversight. Parents deserve to have all the tools available to them to help them to protect their children, and that is why I am proud to be one of the co-sponsors of the safer phones Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister). Much of the focus is on parental control, but as the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) has eloquently outlined, there is potentially no control from the age of 13. Even with controls, who sets what is the right developmental level for access to some apps and social media when there is no child development expert involved? App stores, for example, determine age restrictions themselves. In a number of instances, developers have set an age restriction of 18 for an app, but app stores have lowered that to 17 or 16. There is access but no scrutiny. Unlike for films or other things that our children consume, we have no way of understanding whether there has been independent, child-led expert oversight. We need to raise the age of internet adulthood and ensure that, this summer, Ofcom properly implements age verification for pornographic content as part of the Online Safety Act 2023. We need to remain open to the need for a new online safety Bill to fill the gaps left in the legislation, as has been argued for recently by Ian Russell, Molly Russell’s father. I also support the calls in this debate for bereaved parents to be given retrospective access to their children’s social media accounts. With children’s safety and the future of our society on the line, the time for action is now.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Violence against Women and Girls · Hansard source

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  I wish to acknowledge that I have had the privilege of working alongside the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), for a number of years while I worked in the domestic abuse sector. She was a one-woman safeguarding service. Members from across the House would ask for her advice, so frequently she would advocate for victims when others were unable to do so or when no other service would come to their aid. She has done more for abused women than anyone at X or in the Reform party, Members of which have not appeared here today. I therefore add my voice to those condemning the attacks on her and on others who have spent so long trying to fight for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence. Having spent my career working to prevent violence against women and girls, I am dismayed and frankly disgusted by the way the issue of child sexual abuse, mostly against vulnerable girls, has recently been exploited by political opportunists for their own gain. To see the way people both in and outside the House have spoken about this issue, as if victims and survivors were a political football to be kicked about because of the passing interest of social media-crazed billionaires and their political servants, has been disgraceful. We do not need empty rhetoric or opportunism; we need action, and we need it now. The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, led by Professor Alexis Jay, published its report in 2022, after a seven year-long process that engaged with more than 7,000 victims and survivors, many of them girls. It processed 2 million pages of evidence and published 61 reports and publications. It spent two years working on an inquiry into child sexual exploitation and grooming specifically. In the last three years, I worked closely with colleagues across the children’s sector, including survivors of child sexual abuse, to ensure that the previous Government implemented the inquiry’s recommendations. I am grateful to the Government for having said that they will take many of them forward, but as organisations such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the National Association for People Abused in Childhood have argued, what we need now, and crucially what victims and survivors urgently deserve, is for the recommendations to be implemented. I have been shocked by the lack of progress that we have made as a country in tackling violence against women and girls. I pay tribute to hon. Members across the Chamber who have made a number of big steps to ensure that women and girls are safer, most notably through the Domestic Abuse Act, but despite the changes that we have made in this House, the problem is only getting worse. It has been driven by technological changes and exacerbated by cuts over the last few years to the provision of support for victims and survivors and those at risk. The financial situation facing local specialist charities, for example, is acutely concerning, particularly as many, such as Suffolk Rape Crisis in my area, have been forced to close. I totally understand the financial pressures facing the Government due to the huge black hole the Conservatives left, but charities such as Women’s Aid and Victim Support have raised real concerns after cuts were made to grants in the core victim services budget for police and crime commissioners, at the same time as they are having to grapple with national insurance contributions increasing. After terrible cuts for many years, services are faced with the spectre of having to think about whether they need to close, just as we start our mission as a Government to halve violence against women and girls. Victims deserve to be, and should have a right to be, adequately supported and kept safe from further harm. Services such as the Waveney Domestic Violence and Abuse Forum in my constituency support hundreds of victims without any statutory funding, yet the work that they do is high risk and specialist, and saves women’s lives. Specialist services need long-term, sustainable funding arrangements. We in this place should look to formulate a new statutory duty to commission services for victims of domestic and sexual abuse, both adults and children, and thereby end the postcode lottery that leaves too many vulnerable women and children to fend for themselves. That would meet a key recommendation of the IICSA review, which was to ensure that all child victims of sexual abuse are offered specialist therapeutic support. Similarly, given the significant harm and trauma caused by growing up being exposed to domestic abuse, we need to address the critical shortage of child independent domestic violence advisers. One in five children experience domestic abuse growing up, yet there are barely any services to support them. The domestic abuse charity SafeLives has estimated that an additional 1,900 CHIDVAs are needed to meet the needs of children identified in domestic abuse cases. We also need to look at the drivers behind men’s violence against women and girls. As an officer of the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, I would like to raise the issue of pornography. Women are the targets of both physical and verbal aggression in 94% of scenes in pornographic content, and most of the time the aggressors are men. One woman involved in the pornography industry describes her experience: “I was being hit and choked. I was really upset and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. I asked them to turn the camera off and they kept going.” I am hopeful that the Government will look more closely at online pornographic content that depicts sexual activity with adult actors made to look like children, and content that depicts sexual activity between family members. Children’s charities such as Barnardo’s are concerned that such content acts as a gateway for some viewers who, after repeated consumption, end up needing ever-more-real content, leading them to seek out child sexual abuse material. What is the purpose of pornography that dresses adult women as children—girls, with lollipops and teddy bears, in school uniform? Widely accessible violent pornography is normalising abuse in everyday life, warping the perceptions of both young men and women of sex and healthy relationships, and fuelling the rise of a misogynistic incel culture. Illegal pornographic content is found across the internet, from the most popular pornography websites to social media apps that children still have access to. Ensuring that the Online Safety Act’s age verification checks for children are brought in properly this year, and that websites are held accountable by Ofcom, are paramount in tackling this issue. If necessary, we need to close any loopholes that might allow websites such as Pornhub to swerve their responsibilities under the Act. The Government should also require all online platforms to verify that every individual featured in pornographic content on their site is an adult, consenting to publication, and should bring the regime of online pornographic content regulation into the same system as offline pornography, which is regulated by the British Board of Film Classification. We know that online pornographic content is normalising strangulation. Devon and Cornwall sexual assault referral centre looked at a five-month period in 2023. Of the referrals in that period, 31%—53 out of 172—were of victims who had suffered non-fatal strangulation as part of the sexual violence that they had experienced. Only seven of those cases involved a stranger. Three had to go to A&E due to the severity of their symptoms. Pornography has repositioned strangulation as “breath play”, and so minimised the hugely detrimental health implications: seizures, stroke, paralysis and death. I am, however, particularly glad to see that the victims Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), has this week confirmed that the Government will introduce legislation to create a new offence for creating sexually explicit deepfake images. New deepfakes are having an increasingly insidious impact on children’s lives in particular, as well as the many women and girls who experience it every day. I have been campaigning alongside organisations such as Internet Matters to ban the nudifying tools and apps that create deepfakes. We know they have only one purpose: to violate women and girls; 99% of the images created on the apps are of women, and many do not work on images of men. I see no reason why they not only are freely available to use, but are free to advertise themselves to young people on platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, and app stores, where there is no true age verification. Even with age verification, it is up to the app stores to determine whether content meets an adult’s level of age verification, and I urge the Government to look closely at the regulation of app stores to ensure that the content is independently verified as being suitable for our children to access every day. We are failing our women and girls, and men, if we continue to ignore the public health crisis generated by violent and addictive pornography and the porn culture it generates. I know just how committed the Government and our Front Bench are to tackling violence against women and girls, and I am honoured to be here to support the—I hope—cross-party work we will do to truly end the huge trauma that too many women and girls face.