I, too, would like to speak to amendment 70. I will not detain the House for too long, as some of the points have already been raised. I called for this amendment
when the Bill was going through this House and in the Queen’s Speech. It was very helpful after that to get the support of the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller) in her Westminster Hall debate.
There is a gap in the law that we are closing. It is surprising that, while there are many laws that touch on the issue of revenge porn, none of them quite tackles the essential issue. People were being harmed and a clear wrong was being done, but nothing could be done because there was a hole in the law. I am therefore delighted that the Government accepted the case. There has been substantial debate in the other place and I pay particular tribute to my colleagues, Baroness Grender, Baroness Brinton, Baroness Barker and Lord Marks, who tabled amendments in the other place. Between us, we have managed to get the Government to work out the amendments.
I pay tribute to the victims. I have spoken to many of them, but in particular I pay tribute to Hannah Thompson who has played a very key role in speaking out publicly. That was a very brave thing to do about something that feels very shaming. We should remember her work and pay tribute to her. She will protect many people in the future. The psychological trauma can be huge, as the right hon. Lady has already said. We have seen people face the shame—the sense they did something wrong—when it was someone else who behaved badly. People have lost confidence, they have lost their jobs and, in some cases around the world, they have committed suicide. I therefore welcome the Government’s steps to make this a new offence. It is absolutely the right thing to do. It sends a message that revenge porn should not be tolerated and people should not be able to share these intimate images, entrusted to them, and expect their actions to be completely unpunishable.
That will not be enough, however. Although the right hon. Lady spoke about automatic processes to filter these things out, there will be challenges. The work of the Internet Watch Foundation—I declare an interest as one of its champions—on child abuse images is fantastic, but it cannot be directly mapped on to images of revenge porn, because the images themselves are not the issue; it is about intent and consent. It is hard to distinguish automatically between an image shared voluntarily, which we should not be criminalising if the person is over 18, and an image shared involuntarily, which is the issue that the amendment would tackle. It is not as easy as in the case of child abuse images—not that that is trivial or easy either.