Non-Consensual Sexually Explicit Images and Videos (Offences) Bill [HL]

Second Reading

Moved by

That the Bill be now read a second time.

My Lords, I believe in a woman’s right to choose; the right for her to choose what she does with her own body, the right for her to choose who owns her naked image. With the dawn of AI technology, women have lost this ability. A woman can no longer choose who owns an intimate image of her. Technology has made it possible for intimate images to be created by anyone, anywhere, at any time, regardless of whether a woman consents. The Bill will return power to where it belongs, in the hands of each individual woman. Each clause represents the lived experience of a survivor of image-based sexual abuse. Make no mistake, deepfake abuse is the new frontier of violence against women, and the non-consensual creation of a woman’s naked image is an act of abuse.

Since this technology emerged around 2017, we have seen a rapid proliferation in the content created. It is now near impossible to accurately describe the quantity of these images and videos being made every single day. Research by #MyImageMyChoice found that one app, new to the market, processed 600,000 images in its first three weeks. The largest site dedicated to deepfake abuse has 13.4 million hits every single month.

It is a disproportionately sexist form of abuse, with 99% of all sexually explicit deepfakes being of women. Women are sick and tired of their images being used without their consent to misrepresent, degrade and humiliate them. One survivor, Sophie, who I am honoured to say has joined us today, recalled, “After discovering these images, I questioned, ‘Why me?’. Why had he targeted me in such a way? I stopped making an effort, stopped wearing make-up and didn’t wear my hair down, because maybe, just maybe, if I hadn’t done that before, maybe he wouldn’t have looked at me twice, and maybe it would prevent it happening again”. This abuse causes untold trauma, anxiety and distress.

All women are now forced to live under the ever-present threat than anyone can own sexually explicit content of them. The current law is a patchwork of legislation that cannot keep pace, meaning that we are for ever playing catch-up, while the abuse of women races ahead in a technological revolution of degradation. Meanwhile, victims face a challenging legal situation during a time that one survivor described as leaving her “at the brink of survival”.

The Bill has been written with victim/survivor experience at its heart. This legislation is for Sophie, for Jodie and for every single other woman who has been violated by intimate image abuse: may their experience guide us in creating solid law that criminalises those who seek to minimise and hurt others in this way. The Bill aims to be comprehensive and future-proof against the evolution of these harms. I am grateful for the thoughtful and unwavering counsel of Professor Clare McGlynn, KC, and to the charities and organisations backing the Bill: Refuge, the Revenge Porn Helpline, #MyImageMyChoice, #NotYourPorn, the End Violence Against Women coalition and Jodie Campaigns. I declare my interest as a guest of Google at its future forum, a policy conference where we discussed the vital importance of clear legislation to tackle image-based abuse.

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, not just for the excellent way in which she has introduced her Bill—giving voice to many victims and to the horrors experienced by many women now at an industrial scale, thanks to this technology—but for her bravery. Despite the nasty way she is routinely treated in mainstream and social media, she is choosing to introduce this Bill, and she has done so in an assiduous and inclusive way, briefing Members across both Houses.

I have little to add to the arguments the noble Baroness has made, but it is notable that she has such support across the House. The remaining area of support appears to be my own Government’s Front Bench. They know how much the technology has moved on since the Law Commission set out its recommendations in July 2022. We know there is a manifesto commitment from the Government to do something about this issue, and that they are looking for the right legislative vehicle for doing so. Indeed, they supported the previous Government’s moves on this in April, and just in September they moved regulations to make the sharing of intimate images a priority offence under the Online Safety Act.

What this is now down to is the creation of and new issues around semen images, to which the noble Baroness referred. All there is for me to do is to ask my noble friend the Minister whether it would be in scope for us to do this in the Data (Use and Access) Bill that we are debating on Monday, or whether there is another legislative vehicle that he has got in mind, with the sense of urgency that the noble Baroness rightly set out? Would he be open to meeting a small group of us and helping to find a way forward in this Bill, or another, as a matter of urgency, as this House wants?

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, on bringing forward this Bill. It is timely, essential and urgent.

This new Government have committed to delivering this exact change to the law—

“banning the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes”—

as set out in their manifesto. I urge the Government to grab this opportunity and use this Bill as a vehicle for doing just that, because women cannot suffer a delay on this. A 2023 Security Hero study revealed that 98% of deepfakes are pornographic and that 99% of those deepfakes target women. This underscores the need for swift and urgent action. To fail to use this opportunity means more drivers of violence against women, greater legitimisation of the misogyny so rife today, and the horror of a whole generation growing up to be either victims, or perpetrators, without the full protection or understanding of the law.

I salute the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, for making this her first significant piece of work. As a newbie in the Lords in 2014, one of the first changes in the law that I, along with colleagues such as my noble friend Lord Marks, achieved was to make revenge porn an offence in the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015. At the time, the lawyers and advisers to Ministers urged caution, but we persisted. With many survivors of revenge porn watching from the Gallery, the Minister accepted our amendment. I regret our failure at that time to anticipate the inadequacy of the enforcement and delivery of that change in the law, which required further adjustment—for instance, in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021.

I ask that, as this Bill progresses, we pay particular attention to ensuring that enforcement plays a significant part in the Bill. This Bill attempts to proof against future changes in technology and abilities to find loopholes by using appropriate wording to capture the scope of issues, such as semen images, and the use of wording such as “otherwise capturing”, to anticipate what in this area is the greatest challenge: the time lag in lawmaking versus the breathtaking advance of technology.

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests in this area, particularly as adviser to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford and chair of the 5Rights Foundation.

The argument of the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, is wonderfully put and unimpeachable. We have a patchwork of laws in the UK that are intended to prevent intimate image abuse, but new formats for abuse and the failure to tackle each element in the abuse cycle creates gaps. When dealing with digital systems, it is necessary to tackle harm as far upstream as possible and then consider each stage of creation, spread, current and future use, and deletion, which is what this Bill does.

In 2022, the Law Society wrote that,

“making intimate images is a violation of the subject’s sexual autonomy. We were less sure whether the level of harm was serious enough to criminalise simple making.”

That is wrong, wrong, wrong. I know children and women who live with the threat, or knowledge, that such images exist. If they exist, they are more likely to find a shared use, but the mere threat or their presence can be enough to lead someone to take their own life.

Labour has made a commitment on sexually explicit deepfakes, amid a broader promise to halve the violence against women and girls, yet government sources suggest that the Government have issues with the drafting of the Bill in front of us and that another Bill may be a better vehicle. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, would be happy to accept changes to the drafting, so long as the aims of the Bill are fully realised. We hear murmurs of the Government replacing the idea of consent with that of intent, but intent has proven unenforceable and is therefore unacceptable. Similarly, failing to future-proof the offence by taking out definitions carefully honed to fill gaps would rightly concern the noble Baroness, but drafting issues that do not change the purpose of the Bill can surely be quickly agreed.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, on bringing forward this Bill, which seems to me to be very clear. It was good to witness her evident surprise at having to explain it to a bishop, but she need not have worried on that front.

I do not really understand why the Government, despite making it a manifesto commitment, are not prepared to support the Bill. I support it for three very simple reasons. It is written as seen through the eyes of victims and survivors, which is an essential orientation in framing it. It removes motivation as a test, because the fact that these images exist is enough, and motivation is always subjective and can be argued over for ever. It also restores power to the subject of the images rather than to the taker, which seems to me to be fairly essential.

I want to introduce another element that underlies all this, which might be picked up as this proceeds. Human beings are not commodities. I know that it sounds terribly Marxist to talk about the reification or commodification of people, but we are not commodities. It seems to me that women suffer commodification, whereby stuff can be traded without their consent, in any way that a producer desires. This is dehumanising.

We often hear that we need to better educate boys and men. As I observed to the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, having read the minutes of the Wannsee Conference again recently, 12 out of 15 of the people who devised the final solution in Nazi Germany had earned doctorates. Education does not guarantee virtue. That is why we need legislation.

I wholeheartedly support the noble Baroness in this Bill, unless the Government can come up with a way of achieving the same goals in a different form—but it needs to be done quickly.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to support the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, on her excellent Private Member’s Bill. It is also a pleasure to follow all other speakers, with whom I agree. I hope the Minister is beginning to get a small sense of the opinion of this House and I suspect that he will hear more support for this Bill. This House has already shown in successive Bills its willingness and intent to legislate in these areas: in fact, the whole of Parliament has done so. The noble Baroness rightly paid tribute to the Revenge Porn Helpline. I pay tribute also to organisations such as Refuge and its tech abuse work, which has educated all of us in this space. In the short time available, I will say two main things.

First, I support the specifics of this Bill, which is excellently drafted, with the criminalisation not just of the creation of the images but the solicitation of that creation, the future-proofing by use of the words “otherwise capturing” and the ability to forcibly delete the images so that they are not returned to the person who committed the offence.

In the summer of 2023, this House made it very clear to the then Government, in the form of an amendment to the Online Safety Bill, that it wanted to treat small but high-harm platforms as seriously as the largest platforms. In briefings and just now, the noble Baroness talked about the platforms that host this kind of content. Yes, we want to criminalise these activities, but we will not tackle the commodification of women and violence against women and girls, as we have just heard, unless we also prevent platforms carrying this material. I was struck by an article on this Bill in this week’s House magazine and its reference to the platform 4chan:

“It was this community of people that were quite committed and technologically savvy, trying to advance the cause of deepfaking, and who had absolutely no moral qualms about it at all”.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, who played such a strong part in this issue and others when we discussed the Online Safety Bill last year, as she said. I supported her then and support her on what she has said today. This is a pleasurable reunion of many who have the scars of the Online Safety Bill and join us today in this discussion. In the end, we had a very fulfilling experience, working together harmoniously across the House to get the best we could out of that Bill. I look forward to the contributions of others from that group.

We are today hearing a bit of the futurology that we experienced during the passage of the Online Safety Bill. We recognised that we would probably have to revisit the Bill, now an Act, on a regular basis—perhaps annually—because technology moves so fast and issues are moving into the limelight in a way that we perhaps did not anticipate at the time. Earlier speakers have raised all the points I wanted to make, and I support what they have said, but we need to think very carefully about how we progress on this. It is clear that the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, has thought through a very clear and concise way of approaching an egregious problem that has bubbled and exploded in our faces in recent months, but this may not be the best way forward, as she hinted. It might be better done within the Government’s purview—but that would be at the risk of time and we have heard enough today to recognise that time is of the essence in moving forward.

Drafting in this area is tricky. As we progress the Bill, it will be sensible to listen carefully to what we are hearing from the Government as they move forward. It may be possible to get the Bill into a form that it would be advantageous for the Government to accept, or it may not—time will tell. Whatever it is, we must not lose the essence of the argument we are hearing today: this is an egregious activity that must be stopped. There are three layers to it, which are picked up by the Bill. The way forward on this is to make sure that we identify clearly what the issues are and the outcomes we want, in a way that—as we have heard—will work for those who have to fulfil and implement the Bill, and that this is done in a timely manner, otherwise too much will be lost.

My Lords, I, too, emphatically support the Bill. As the father of a seven year-old girl, with her teenage years and young adulthood ahead of her, I found the stories of those subject to deepfake abuse to be truly terrifying, as is the rate of its proliferation. In the last year alone, over 140,000 new deepfake videos appeared online—more than in all previous years put together. The largest website dedicated to this abuse receives over 13 million visits monthly; one app processed 600,000 images in its first three weeks of operation. The law urgently needs to catch up with this new reality and the Bill would make that happen.

I would like to make three points about it. First, I completely reject the suggestion in some quarters—thankfully, not among any speakers today so far—that the Bill would be an unjustified interference with individual freedoms. This completely devalues the concept of civil liberties and individual freedoms, and it is frankly insulting to those who have devoted and given their lives to defending those freedoms to tarnish them by association with the abusive creation of demeaning fake sexual images of people. The only real rights in play here are those of the victims, as my noble friend Lady Owen so compellingly put it.

Secondly, I support the Bill’s approach of making the proposed offence consent-based, as opposed to the perpetrator’s intent having to be proved. As the Law Commission has explained, it would be impractical to require proof in each case that the perpetrator had the specific motive of causing distress or sexual gratification. Such a requirement would deprive the legislation of practical utility. Like dangerous driving, the act is itself sufficiently reprehensible for the law to treat it as criminal without having to delve into the perpetrator’s mind. In any event, let us be realistic here: it is no leap of faith for the law to assume that someone involved in creating or soliciting deepfake images without consent is not doing so innocently, or is oblivious to the obvious impact that such images can have on their victims. So I ask the Minister to confirm whether the Government will commit, whether through this Bill or other legislation, to a consent-based offence.