Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 20—Sharing or threatening to share intimate photograph or film: modesty clothing—

“(1) Section 188 of the Online Safety Act 2023 is amended as follows.

(2) After inserted section 66D(5)(e) insert—

‘(f) the person not wearing modesty clothing such as a hijab or niqab when they would normally do so.’”

This new clause would see definition of “intimate image” extended to include specific categories of image that may be considered intimate by particular religious or cultural groups.

The clause is the latest in a sequence of legislation dealing with intimate image abuse. People may correct me if I am wrong, but I think I am right to say that we have not dealt with intimate image abuse until this Parliament. The first time it hit the statute book properly was the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. I think it is also right to say that, as a Parliament, we have framed it correctly as something that is more often than not just another ugly incarnation of coercive control. It is highly intrusive, humiliating and distressing conduct.

In November 2022, following the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act, the Government announced their intention to create a suite of new offences to deal with intimate image abuse, closely based on the Law Commission’s recommendations in its July 2022 report. Under the Online Safety Act 2023—I hope the Committee will not mind if I spend a moment on the chronology and the legislative journey on intimate image abuse—the Government repealed the offences of disclosing or threatening to disclose private sexual images, replacing them with four new offences of sharing or threatening to share intimate images.

The Bill goes further to tackle the taking of intimate images without consent, and the process of installing equipment for that purpose. First, it repeals two voyeurism offences related to voyeurism of a private act and taking images under a person’s clothing, for which we use the shorthand “upskirting”—although that precedes the life of this Parliament, so I am wrong about that. Anyway, both those offences are reasonably new and have resulted in amendments to the Sexual Offences Act 2003. The Bill will replace them with new criminal offences to tackle the taking or recording of intimate images without consent and the installing of equipment for such purposes.

Those taking offences build on the sharing offences identified in the Online Safety Act to provide a unified package of offences using the same definitions and core elements. That addresses the criticism that there was previously a patchwork of protection, which the police told us led to gaps in provision when it came to this type of behaviour. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend Dame Maria Miller, who is not a member of the Committee. She has done a lot of work on the issue, and identified this problem in particular. As we know, one of the issues was proving intent.

I am grateful to the Law Commission for its work. It consulted widely with the police, prosecutors and legal practitioners, so we could not only read its report, but hear from a range of experts, including those supporting and campaigning on behalf of victims, and others who are far more knowledgeable than any of us.

The clause will insert a suite of new provisions after section 66 of the 2003 Act. The clause will create three new offences: the taking or recording of an intimate photograph or film without consent; and two new offences about installing equipment to enable a taking offence. I will go through them briefly.

The first provision of the clause is the creation of what we call a base offence of taking any intentional image of a person in an intimate state without their consent. That amounts to what we will call a section 66AA offence. It removes the requirement for a reason or motive. It does not matter if the person was doing it for a joke or for financial payment, or even if their reason was not particularly sinister. The base offence would be met if those elements were established. The offence is triable summarily only and will attract a maximum prison term of six months.

The wording of the two more serious offences mirrors some of the language that we are familiar with; the offences refer not just to “intentionally” taking an image, including of a person in an intimate state without their consent, but to having the intent of causing them “alarm, distress or humiliation”, or taking the image for the purpose of “obtaining sexual gratification” for themselves or another person. The offences are serious and carry a maximum sentence of two years. The three offences are designed to achieve the right balance between the protection of the victim and the avoidance of any over-criminalisation. I will return to that when I speak to new clause 20, tabled by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley.

The base taking offence is subject to a defence of reasonable excuse, such as a police officer taking an image without consent for purposes connected with criminal proceedings. Similarly, a base sharing offence is subject to the defence of reasonable excuse; for example, images taken for the purpose of a child’s medical treatment would meet that threshold, even if the victim was distressed by that. There is another exemption—I do not know who came up with this example, but it is a good one—if the image is taken in a public place and the person shown in the image is in the intimate state voluntarily. A distinction is therefore drawn between, for example, a photo of a streaker at a football match, and that of someone who had a reasonable expectation of privacy; that would relate to upskirting, for example.

We are also creating two offences to do with the installation of spycams, which I am afraid we see more and more of in cases going through the courts: an offence of installing, adapting, preparing or maintaining equipment with the intention of taking or recording intimate photograph or film; and an offence of supplying for that purpose. To be clear, it will not be necessary for the image to have been taken; if equipment was installed for that purpose, that is enough to meet the requirements of the offence.[Official Report, 1 March 2024, Vol. 746, c. 5MC.] (Correction)

Overall, the clause amends the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to ensure that notification requirements can be applied, where the relevant criteria are met, to those convicted of the new offence of taking for sexual gratification and installing with the intent to enable the commission of that offence. I commend the clause to the Committee. I will respond to the new clause later.

I will be brief. New clause 20 would extend the definition of “intimate image” to include specific categories of image that may be considered intimate by particular religious or cultural groups—for example, instances of a person not wearing modesty clothing such as a hijab or niqab when they would normally do so.

As the Minister set out, legislative action on the intimate image issue has largely been taken in this Parliament. In an era in which everyone has a camera on their phone, one might have expected this to have become much more of an issue, but for some women the legislation has not gone far enough to protect them. I came across the case of a woman who was supported by the charity Ashiana in Sheffield. She is a practising Muslim who wears a hijab. She was pregnant and in an abusive relationship, and her partner was the perpetrator of her sexual exploitation. He took photos of her not wearing her hijab and used them to blackmail her. He threatened to send the images to the woman’s ex-husband and to the community. That could have put the woman, her family and her new daughter at significant risk. To deal with the immediate danger, the woman was re-housed away from the perpetrator. However, when she reported the threat to the police, nothing came of it; the threat was not taken seriously, and there was a lack of understanding of her fear. The threat that she experienced is not covered by the Bill. That is all the new clause seeks to cover.

Threats to share intimate images that, for instance, portray a Muslim woman without her hijab can and are being used as a method of blackmail and coercion. That exposes women to further domestic abuse and so-called honour-based violence. We need to find a new term for that. I hate saying “so-called honour-based violence”; it’s just violence, isn’t it? Perpetrators have been known to threaten to send photos to the men in a woman’s family, for example, and to the community. There are lots of different groups of women we often forget in broader legislation, and I seek not to have these women forgotten in this legislation.

Clause 13 is right and is a welcome addition, so I do not have much to say about the two lines that form it. I will keep my powder dry for my amendments to the schedule that the clause introduces, which is where the action is.

New clause 20 is a welcome addition to the debate and would be a welcome addition to the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley says, some people get forgotten in our discussions. The point of having a diverse Parliament that represents the country that we serve is that we try to work that out, but we all have a responsibility to step up and meet the moment. I will be interested to hear what the Minister says about the new clause. When we talk about intimate photos or films, the question is: to whom is it intimate? The new clause—and we—say that it is intimate to the person who has suffered that photo or filming, and who is being threatened with the sharing of those images. It is intimate to them, rather than to the perpetrator. Nothing could be clearer than that in the horrible case that my hon. Friend raises. We support the new clause, and I hope that the Minister does, too.

I am very sensitive to the issues that have been raised and will respond to them, but I will also explain why we do not accept the new clause.

We have steered very close to the course recommended by the Law Commission in what we have defined in law as an intimate image. It includes anything that shows a person who is nude or partially nude, or who is doing anything sexual or very intimate, such as using the toilet. It is a wider definition of “intimate” than was used in the revenge porn provisions under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. We have expanded it, but we have confined it to what we think anyone in this country would understand as “intimate”.

One of the challenges in adopting a definition of “intimate” that includes, for example, the removal of a hijab is that we are creating a criminal offence of that image being shared. It would not be obvious to anyone in this country who received a picture of a woman they did not know with her hair exposed that they were viewing an intimate image and committing a criminal offence.[Official Report, 1 March 2024, Vol. 746, c. 6MC.] (Correction) The Law Commission has made very similar points in relation to showing the legs of a woman who is a Hasidic Jew, or showing her without her wig on. This would be grotesquely humiliating for that victim, but that would not be completely obvious to any member of the public who might receive such an image of them.

Will the Minister give way?

I will, but I would like to develop this point a little bit more.

I strongly suggest that the hon. Lady does not come from the same community as me. I described images being sent to the community; the nature of the image would absolutely be clear to lots of people where I live.

I was going to complete the point. If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will do so before I give way again. We have to create laws that apply equally to everybody in the United Kingdom. If we are to create an offence of sharing intimate images, we have to have a translation of intimacy that is absolutely irrefutable to anybody sending that image around. Even if they do not know the person in the image, it has to be absolutely clear to the sender that they are sending an intimate image. I have already made the point that it would not be immediately obvious to everyone in the United Kingdom that an image of a woman showing her hair was a humiliating image of her. It would not automatically be an intimate image even if the person sharing it knew that the woman in the image was Muslim, because some Muslim women do not wear headscarves.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley described a very dark case. She mentioned the language of blackmail and honour-based violence. She intimated coercive control. My simple point is that in the circumstances she has identified, there are a host of serious criminal offences being committed in conjunction with the use of the intimate image. We would say, very respectfully, that we think that kind of crime belongs much more comprehensively within other offences.

rose—

I am not going to engage in a case-by-case discussion. It is so difficult for me to do that; I do not have the papers in front of me. I understand the issue about community-based events, but if the purpose of sending the image is to blackmail a person, they have already engaged another element of the criminal law, and there is already aggravation, in that the perpetrator is being domestically abusive or is committing an honour-based offence, as the hon. Lady described.

I want to make it clear that by introducing the base offence, this legislation is removing the need to show an intention to cause distress. That is the issue that Georgia Harrison had, but managed to circumvent when she got that very successful and high-profile conviction against Stephen Bear, who went to prison for two years. She had an evidential difficulty in proving intent in her case. Although she did, she then became a really powerful advocate for removing intent from the offence, and we have done so.

I am not for a moment suggesting that there will not be cases of maximum sensitivity in which somebody is humiliated, but as I say, in the case that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley described, in the background, other offences were materialising. Our view is that it is more appropriate that they are dealt with under other elements of the law, rather than our muddling the police response, or even creating offenders where we do not mean to, because under the hon. Lady’s offence, the offender does not know they are committing an offence. They might think that they are sharing an image of a glamorous woman, not knowing that it is grossly offensive that they have shown a picture of a woman who does not have her hair covered as she normally would, because they do not know her.

I hope that answers the hon. Lady. With great respect, I urge her not to press her new clause. However, I would like to hear from her, because I did not give way to her a moment ago.

The rules allow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley, to come back again—and the Minister can, in fact, respond again, if she would like to.

I understand exactly where the Minister is coming from. I understand not wishing to over-criminalise anybody for something accidental. I will just say that chance would be an absolutely fine thing. In the case that I was talking about, the police laughed at the woman when she went to them about it. Sometimes we on these Committees say, “Well, there’s already an offence for that,” and I think, “Is there?” In real life, there is not, when the rubber hits the road. I am not sure how many times people in this room have tried to get these criminal cases across the line. I do it every single week. In my life, I have done thousands and thousands.

The argument is the same for this legislation: what is the point of having it? Take Georgia Harrison’s case—let me give her a shout out. Good luck to her on “Love Island: All Stars”. I will definitely be supporting her; she is a friend of mine. There are probably all sorts of bits of legislation around posting an image of an ex partner. We say about spiking, “Well, there is already legislation for that,” but it does not work. Our job is to try to make laws that work in real life. I am afraid to say that there will be lots of cases of the kind that I am talking about. There just will, and the women involved will not be able to rely on this legislation.

The Minister said, “We try to make laws for all people in our country.” It does not always feel like that. We leave loads of people out. I will not press the new clause to a Division, because my point has been made. I am drawing a line in the sand when it comes to people in this Committee telling me, “There is another law for that,” when I know fine well that those other laws do not work.

Would the Minister like to respond?

I have probably gone as far as I can. There are no circumstances in which Georgia Harrison’s case would not be covered by the provision that we are discussing. The other person can be a current partner or an ex, or there can be no relationship. [Interruption.] I know that the hon. Lady is talking about a different category of case. I wonder whether one of the problems in the case that she raises is the adequacy of the police response, rather than whether an offence exists for it. It is difficult, in drafting legislation, to create a category of offender when an image would not be recognised as being intimate by everybody in the United Kingdom. On that basis, with great respect, I am afraid that we would have to reject her new clause.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 13 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.