My Lords, I have two amendments in this grouping. I am afraid that I did not have time to get others to put their names to them, but I hope that they will find some support in this Committee.
For almost the whole of 2021, I chaired an inquiry in Scotland into misogyny. It was about the fact that many complaints were being made to the devolved Government in Scotland about women’s experiences not just of online harassment but of the disinhibition that the internet and social media have given people to be abusive online now also visiting the public square. Many people described the ways in which they are publicly harassed. I know that concerns people in this House too.
When I came to the Bill, I was concerned about something that became part of the evidence we heard. It is no different down here from in Scotland. As we know, many women—I say women, but men receive harassment online too—are sent really vicious, vile things. We all know of parliamentarians and journalists who have received them, their lives made a misery by threats to rape and kill and people saying, “Go and kill yourself”. There are also threats of disfigurement—“Somebody should take that smile off your face”—and suggestions that an acid attack be carried out on someone.
In hearing that evidence, it was interesting that some of the forms of threat are not direct in the way that criminal law normally works; they are indirect. They are not saying, “I’m going to come and rape you”. Sometimes they say that, but a lot of the time they say, “Somebody should rape you”; “You should be raped”; “You deserve to be raped”; “You should be dead”; “Somebody should take you out”; “You should be disfigured”; “Somebody should take that smile off your face, and a bit of acid will do it”. They are not saying, “I’m going to come and do it”, in which case the police go round and, if the person is identifiable, make an arrest—as happened with Joanna Cherry, the Scottish MP, for example, who had a direct threat of rape, and the person was ultimately charged under the Communications Act.
Our review of the kinds of threat taking place showed that it was increasingly this indirect form of threat, which has a hugely chilling effect on women. It creates fear and life changes, because women think that some follower of this person might come and do what is suggested and throw acid at them as they are coming out of their house, and they start rearranging their lives because of it—because they live in constant anxiety about it. It was shocking to hear the extent to which this is going on.
In the course of the past year, we have all become much more familiar with Andrew Tate. What happens with these things is that, because of the nature of social media and people having big followings, you get the pile-on: an expression with which I was not that familiar in the past but now understand only too well. The pile-on is where, algorithmically, many different commentaries are brought together and suddenly the recipient receives not just one, or five, but thousands of negative and nasty threats and comments. Of course, as a public person in Parliament, or a councillor, you are expected to open up your social media, because that is how people will get in touch with you or comment on the things you are doing, but then you receive thousands of these things. This affects journalists, Members of Parliament, councillors and the leaders of campaigns. For example, it was interesting to hear that people involved in the Covid matters received threats. It affects both men and women, but the sexual nature of the threats to women is horrifying.
The Andrew Tate thing is interesting because only yesterday I saw in the newspapers that part of the charging in Romania is about the way in which, because of his enormous following, and his encouragement of violence towards women, he is being charged, among many other things that are directly about violence to and the rape of women, for his incitement to these behaviours in many of his young male followers. In the report of the inquiry that I conducted, there are a number of recommendations around offences of that sort.
To specifically deal with this business of online threats, my amendments seek to address their indirect nature—not the ones that say, “I’m going to do it”, but the encouragement to others to do it or to create the fear that it will happen—and to look at how the criminal law addresses that.
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I started out with the much lesser suggestion of inserting that the threat be either by the person who is sending the message or another individual, but the more I reflected on it the more it did not seem to me that that went far enough to deal with what one was seeking to address here. This is why I have an alternative, Amendment 267AB.
Noble Lords will see that it says:
“A person commits an offence if they issue a communication concerning death”.
I have written “concerning death” rather than “a threat to kill” because the former can include someone saying, “You should kill yourself”, “You should commit suicide” or “You should harm yourself”. The amendment also refers to “assault (sexual or otherwise)”, which could include all manner of sexual matters but also self-harming and “disfigurement”. I was shocked at the extent to which disfigurement is suggested in these kinds of abusive texts to all manner of people—even campaigners. Even a woman who campaigns on air pollution after the death of her child from a fatal asthmatic attack receives the most horrible threats and abuse online. When people do this, they know the impact that it is going to have. They do it, as my amendment says,
“knowing it will cause alarm or distress to a specific person or specific people”,
rather than making generalised threats to the world.
As the Minister will know, I wrote to him wondering whether his team might put their great legal minds to this because we have to find a way of addressing the fact that people are encouraging others to make threats. We have to look at the effect that this has on the recipients, who are often women in public life in one way or another; the way in which it affects our polity and women’s participation, not just in public life but in politics and civil society generally; and the way in which it deters women from living their lives freely and equally with menfolk.
I hope that the Committee will think on that and that the Minister can come back to me with some positive things, even if he does not accept the particular formulation that I sought to devise. It may be that a different formulation could be sought, perhaps to include that it is done “recklessly”. I am prepared to consider its impact on people, but I think that it is done with knowledge of the impact that it will have, and where it is foreseeable that there will be an impact.
I urge the Committee to consider these matters. As I just heard one of my colleagues in the Committee suggest, this is a moment to seize. You can be sure that we cannot encapsulate everything, but we should be trying to cover as much as possible and the horrors of what is now happening on social media.