Tag: Maria Miller

The speech made by Maria Miller, the Conservative MP for Basingstoke, in the House of Commons on 10 March 2022.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered International Women’s Day.

There is a dreadful poignancy in opening this debate today. The bombing of a Ukrainian women and children’s hospital yesterday has left pregnant women on stretchers, covered in blood from shrapnel wounds, and I would hope that the message that we send from this place to every woman in Ukraine during this week of events to mark International Women’s Day is that we stand with those women against those who wage war on their country. We stand alongside those women in their battle for a free and independent Ukraine. We stand with the people of Belarus and Russia who do not want war. I was delighted to meet the Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, in Parliament today to reinforce that message.

In Ukraine, International Women’s Day is usually a public holiday—an opportunity to mark the unique role that women play in the culture of their nation—but this year has been very different indeed, because it is the women of Ukraine who make up the vast majority of refugees. The Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison), will share my horror at seeing those women fleeing their homeland. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is right to be redoubling the Government’s efforts to cut unnecessary bureaucracy, so that we can offer women who seek sanctuary in our country swift passage.

Acts of war and aggression disproportionately affect women. In Afghanistan, just 12 months ago on International Women’s Day, that nation celebrated the remarkable contribution made by Afghan women against the challenges of the covid pandemic. Now, the hard-won progress made on women’s rights over the past two decades has been all but reversed, with a new Taliban Government having no place for the 67 women elected to the Afghan Parliament. We know that the best way we can fight dictatorships and autocracies around the world is through support for democratic capacity for effective democratic institutions.

The truth is that every democracy is fragile; it has to be nurtured. As we mark International Women’s Day as parliamentarians, we should focus every fibre of our body on how we can strengthen democracies around the world, because democracy is under threat like never before. Strong parliamentarians are representative of their people. Women playing their proper role in Parliament is not an optional extra; it is essential for our legitimacy. This year’s theme of “Break the Bias” could not be more appropriate, because there are few democracies around the world where women have an equal role in policy making and policy scrutiny—not even our own. Some 27 years on from the 1995 UN Beijing platform for action, which demanded worldwide equal participation for women in political decision making, we have seen slow progress, with just one in four elected representatives around the world being a woman.

For International Women’s Day 2022, let us call for a renewed commitment to women’s equal role in policy making and policy scrutiny to ensure progress on securing women’s roles in democratic institutions. Internationally, both our Parliament and our Government actively support the rights of women and girls. The Government, through their work on education for girls and their support for organisations such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, work hard to help build women’s political participation. Here in Parliament, many of us are members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians, and we work with legislative bodies around the world to share our expertise and knowledge. Gender-sensitive Parliament audits are a practical support that the CPA has put in place for jurisdictions to address their institutionalised gender inequality. Over the past year, the CPA has trained women parliamentarians around the world to deal with online abuse, helping to find a way forward on one of the issues that holds so many women back from wanting to seek election in the first place.

We want strong democracies around the world, but it has never been more important for our own Parliament to be an exemplar. In Westminster, there are still twice as many men as women elected to this place, demonstrating the challenges even embedded democracies have. I stand here as a Conservative Member of Parliament to say that there are three men for every one woman in my party, which is the Government party. That has to change.

Each party takes this problem extremely seriously. I know that the Conservative party does, and we are acting. It is right that we press Government and political parties to do more, but Parliament itself has to act, too, as the custodian of one of the most important parts of our democracy is our legislature. As Sue Maguire high- lighted in her report to Government in 2018, while quotas for women to come into Parliament have a place—the Labour party has made good use of them—they do not

“address the cultural and working practices in Parliament and local Government that remain significant barriers”.

We can and must challenge the Government to do more, and parties to act, but if we simply say it is the fault of political parties, we are not listening to the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

I applaud Mr Speaker for creating real momentum for change here, even before he became Speaker, by addressing for the first time issues such as the personal security of Members. We also now have a behaviour code and grievance procedures, thanks to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom).We have proxy voting for new parents and effective procedures to deal with bullying, as we saw earlier this week, but where is the progress on the other measures that have been put forward?

Effecting change in this place can feel almost impossible. Although we have Select Committees to hold the Government to account, where is the mechanism to hold ourselves to account? There is no structure in Parliament for Members to identify a programme of co-ordinated change—coherent, transparent and accountable change—that would make this place somewhere that more women want to come to and stay in.

As the Women and Equalities Committee’s report that was published last week by my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) said, five years on from the Childs “The Good Parliament” report and 10 more reports like it, many of the recommendations that have been put forward remain unanswered. Some of the actions can be delivered by Parliament and some need Parliament to work with the Government, but above all we need a co-ordinated plan of action for the House of Commons to get our House in order and to get equal representation of women as a top priority.

I will give a couple of examples. We need to ensure that the Government implement section 106 of the Equality Act 2010, which is already in place, to require parties to publish data on the diversity of their candidates and appointments to the House of Lords, a recommendation made more than five years ago. We need to focus our House service public engagement on women’s participation in democracy and reach out to women across the United Kingdom to encourage them to consider standing for election, as we did at the all-party parliamentary group on women in Parliament’s event on Tuesday evening, which was attended by more than 100 women. Those events should not be held by Members; they should be held by the House of Commons to encourage more women to stand for election.

We need to focus the House communications team on talking about the positive changes that we have already made to our culture here as a result of the new behaviour code and the grievance process. We need to work with the Government to ensure that there is legislation and enforcement against online threats, which disproportionately affect women Members. We need to embed a programme of training for Members who are using social media. We know that those actions need to happen, but we need to have a plan and there needs to be accountability for swift progress.

We are the custodians of our legislative body. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for securing the time for this debate and the APPG officers and members for their support in it. A representative and inclusive House of Commons is essential for the fully effective functioning of a parliamentary democracy. The House itself has a unique responsibility to take steps to ensure that we are representative of the population. Recruiting good people is a matter for political parties, but parties cannot change what people think of Parliament or how they feel about working in the House of Commons. I want today’s debate marking International Women’s Day to be a call to action for our own Parliament. As Members, we need to ensure that the House of Commons is a place that everyone aspires to be part of, including women.

The speech made by Maria Miller, the Conservative MP for Basingstoke, in the House of Commons on 2 December 2021.

It is a great pleasure to speak in this Adjournment debate. There can be few things more harmful, traumatising or abusive than for an individual to have a nude or sexually explicit image shared without their consent with thousands or even millions of people online. It is a horrific invention of the online world and an act of sexual abuse because it is done without the consent of the victim.

Technology is being used every day to invent new and even more grotesque ways of inflicting abuse, particularly sexual violence, especially against women and girls. I have secured this debate on deepfake and nudification image abuse because they are yet more forms of abuse against women and girls, their impact is not understood, and they continue to be largely unrecognised, especially in law and the legal sanctions that are available. It is a great pleasure to see the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice on the Front Bench, underlining the Government’s understanding of the need to address this issue.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term “deepfakes”, they are pornographic images that are created by merging existing pornographic content with the image of an individual—usually a woman—who has not given her consent. The resulting pornographic material is often violent, including illegal depictions of rape. In a similar way, nudification software takes everyday images—again, usually of women without their consent—and uses an extensive database of pornographic images to create a new image that makes it appear as though the original subject of the photo is nude.

The decision to create and share a deepfake or a nudified image is a highly sinister, predatory and sexualised act undertaken without the consent of the person involved. It has been a growing problem for the past 10 years, along with other forms of intimate image abuse. Reports of such abuse have grown by almost 90% in the past 12 months, coinciding—not coincidentally—with the lockdown, the pandemic and the changes in behaviour that are leaving many people at home for longer periods.

All forms of intimate image abuse have a significant and long-term impact on their victims, but I believe that deepfakes and nudification are particularly pernicious because the images are almost completely fabricated, causing psychological harm, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder—the list goes on. Some people experience an impact on their physical health or damage to their relationships. There may also be damage to their financial situation because of the need to take time off work or perhaps withdraw altogether from the online world, which we all know is a fundamental part of most people’s jobs in modern society. In some cases, there have been reports of self-harm and even attempted suicide among those who have been a victim of this heinous act.

I would like to turn specifically to the impact on individuals. This horrific abuse can happen to absolutely anyone, as a constituent of the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) discovered in 2019 when she learned that her image had been uploaded to a pornographic website—an ordinary image from her social media that was then manipulated with software to make it appear as if she were in something completely pornographic. She was only alerted to the existence of the photos by an acquaintance after the images had been in circulation for years. The original images were taken from her social media, including photographs from her pregnancy.

I commend the hon. Member’s constituent, because she has had the courage to speak out about something that many cannot or feel unable to speak about. We can understand that much more closely when we hear her words explaining how she felt. She said that the images were “chilling” and that she still experiences nightmares. Speaking of the experience, she said:

“Obviously, the underlying feeling was shock and I initially felt quite ashamed, as if I’d done something wrong. That was quite a difficult thing to overcome. And then for a while I got incredibly anxious about even leaving the house.”

That reaction is typical; it leaves many women frightened to seek the help that they need.

Another victim—I will call her Alana, although that is not her real name—was identified by Professor Clare McGlynn in her work on “Shattering Lives and Myths”, a report on the issue. Alana also had faked intimate images widely circulated without her consent. Her testimony is equally harrowing; I will quote from it, because her words are powerful and the Minister needs to hear them if he is to bring the right solutions to this place. She said:

“It has the power to ruin your life, and is an absolute nightmare, and it is such a level of violation…because you are violated not only by the perpetrator but you also feel violated because society doesn’t recognise your harm. It is a very isolating experience, it is a very degrading and demeaning experience, it is life-ruining.”

Those are words that we should all listen to as we move forward, hopefully, to some solutions.

At the moment, deepfakes are not against the law, and people who use nudification software are not recognised as sexually abusing others. Deepfakes have been a shocking development in violence against women online. Let us be clear: this technology is almost exclusively used to inflict violence against women. Indeed, the cyber research firm Sensity found that 96% of all deepfakes are pornographic and that all the pornographic deepfakes it detected—100%—targeted women.

Offline, non-consensual sexual acts are recognised in the criminal law through the crimes of sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape—the list goes on, yet those responsible for developing and using technology in the online world and through artificial intelligence have been allowed to operate perniciously and with impunity, inflicting online sexual attacks on women and girls without criminal consequences. We cannot allow the online world to be a continuum of the offline world where women and girls experience even further new forms of sexual abuse and violence, which is why we need a new law to criminalise the taking, making and sharing of nude and sexual images without consent, including deepfakes and nudification. Those, surely, are some of the worst forms of such activity.

This technology is no longer the reserve of movie CGI experts. Image manipulation can be incredibly technical, but nowadays creating content of this kind is dangerously easy. With the development of nudification apps that can be downloaded on to a phone, anyone can create an indecent image of somebody without their consent in seconds. Apps and websites like these are not hidden in the recesses of the dark net, undiscovered; they are receiving millions of visitors. In the first seven months of 2021, one nudifying app received a staggering 38 million hits. This service has an interesting slogan: it is to

“make all men’s dreams come true”.

I am sure that is not the case, because I know that many of my hon. Friends would find this as abhorrent as I do. The app allows users to undress thousands of women without their consent, and runs an “incentive program” for users who share the links to their deepfakes, so users who get clicks on their deepfakes can nudify more pictures faster. It is disgusting, but it is not against the law. We have to act.

Deepfakes are widely regarded by academics as the future of violence against women online, but the existing law is woefully behind and largely redundant. Section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, the so-called revenge porn legislation, in whose drafting I was involved, was a good step in the right direction, but it specifically excludes altered or photoshopped images and videos; and there are shortfalls in the current law because it does not adequately capture all motivations for non-consensually taking or sharing an intimate image. Although motivations such as sexual gratification and causing distress are covered, if the image that is being nudified was not originally private or intimate in nature, and if it was not shared directly with the individual in the photograph, it can be interpreted by law enforcement agencies as not having the intention of harassing or causing distress, even if it is shared with thousands of people on the internet. That is clearly an absurdity that needs to be changed.

Threats to share images have now been included in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, and the Government are to be applauded for making that change, but if no threat to share is made, there is the potentially ridiculous scenario that the image could be legally shared if the motivation to share it was a joke, because such motives are not recognised in the current law.

I hope I have explained why it is so critical for the Online Safety Bill to effectively mitigate violence against women and girls online by introducing new criminal offences—and I would say that they should be sex offences—of the taking, making and sharing of intimate images without consent. I know that the Online Safety Bill is very popular—we heard about that in the previous debate—but perhaps the Government should be thinking of a set of Bills to be introduced together, rather than trying to put everything into one Bill. There might be a suite of Bills to tackle all the different issues, to prevent the risk of making one Bill so expansive that it becomes what is commonly known as a Christmas tree Bill. It is an innovative approach, which I am surprised that the Government do not take more often when dealing with highly complex areas that are interrelated.

In the tackling violence against women and girls strategy, the Government have committed to root out offending online as well as offline. They cite the forthcoming Online Safety Bill as the instrument in their efforts to do this, but reform of the laws on intimate image abuse is not yet included in the Bill. This oversight needs to be addressed before the Bill comes back to this House for debate, which we hope will be in the very near future. The current law is not fit for purpose. It is a patchwork of different elements based on defined motivations that can make prosecutions more difficult and that fails to recognise the nature and impact of image-based abuse online. If we have an Online Safety Bill that does not tackle the gaps in the criminal law, it will be a Bill that falls well short of what our constituents need.

The Law Commission has already developed a wide range of recommendations for legal reform in this area that are widely supported by industry stakeholders and experts, so I urge the Government to fast-track those recommendations through the Online Safety Bill, in recognition of the fact that we cannot wait any longer for legal reform. We need deepfake and the use of nudification apps to be outlawed in a comprehensive new law to criminalise the making, taking and sharing of intimate sexual images without consent. This change is long overdue, and I know that this Minister understands that point. I look forward to hearing his response to the debate.

The speech made by Maria Miller, the Conservative MP for Basingstoke, in the House of Commons on 12 April 2021.

I am very grateful for the opportunity to send deepest condolences on behalf of myself and my constituents here in Basingstoke to Her Majesty the Queen on the death of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, and to send deepest sympathy to the whole of the royal family.

The Duke of Edinburgh’s was a life of public service, through his military service, his patronage of hundreds of charities and community organisations and, of course, through his very clear service over more than seven decades in support of Her Majesty the Queen. His Royal Highness has quite simply been part of all our lives over the past seven decades. He led by example in his commitment to public service, to our communities and to those hundreds of charities and community organisations. That genuine passion and commitment to our country, our communities and our charities, which are so important to us, start to explain the depth of feeling expressed throughout the United Kingdom following his death on Friday.

That serious commitment was coupled with a serious sense of humour, as we have heard in earlier tributes. I had a small insight into that when I met His Royal Highness on more informal occasions. I think particularly of when my daughter and I met him a few years ago at a Buckingham Palace garden party. My daughter had just taken her A-levels, and after vigorously shaking her hand Prince Philip made it very clear that he was incredulous that any 18-year-old would want to spend their time meeting a pensioner, rather than being off travelling in the far east—typically self-deprecating and typically putting everyone at ease.

Here in Hampshire, tributes have been led by our lord lieutenant, Nigel Atkins, and in Basingstoke by our mayor, Diane Taylor. Our flags are flown at half mast, our floral tributes have been laid and heartfelt tributes have been paid to the contribution that Prince Philip made over so many years, including memories of his visits to Hampshire, particularly when he opened the Milestones museum in Basingstoke town.

Of course, His Royal Highness will be best remembered for launching the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme back in 1956 to help young people develop the skills and resilience that they need to succeed in life. Over the past 65 years, more than 6 million have completed this award. As we look forward, what better way to commemorate his life and to cement his legacy than to continue to commit to support an expansion of youth work and extra-curricular activities for all young people, particularly following the last year and the effect of the pandemic on so many young people.

There will be time for us to develop that thinking more as we look to the future and at how the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme and other youth organisations can cement the passion and commitment that he had to support young people, but at this time we need to salute Prince Philip’s service to our country. He will be missed, but his legacy will certainly go on.

The speech made by Maria Miller, the Conservative MP for Basingstoke, in the House of Commons on 11 March 2021.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered International Women’s Day.

It is a privilege to lead this International Women’s Day debate on behalf of members of the all-party parliamentary group on women in Parliament, who put forward the application. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for its continued strong support for this debate as an annual event.

I want to start by sending my thoughts and prayers to the family and friends of Sarah Everard, who are going through such a painful time. Her abduction has sent shockwaves across the UK. Sarah did everything to avoid danger. Let us be very clear: women are not the problem here. For many women, this news story will bring back memories of threatening situations they found themselves in through no fault of their own, sexually harassed on the streets when walking home from meeting friends, receiving anonymous threats of physical violence on social media, or sexually assaulted in plain sight in rush hour on public transport on the way to work. Many choose not to talk about this and not to report it for fear of not being believed or taken seriously. But the research shows that these sorts of events are part of women’s everyday lives, and that is why what happened to Sarah Everard feels so very close to home.

The shocking findings of the report published yesterday by the APPG on United Nations women show that virtually all young women have experienced the threat of sexual violence in public spaces and, indeed, that three in four women of all ages have experienced sexual harassment. Although the raw facts may show that it is rare for a woman to be abducted, the experience of young women is that the fear of sexual harassment, or worse, is ever in their mind, whether on a night out at the pub or after threats to their physical safety on social media, while for the one in six women who will be stalked in their lifetime, the fear of attack is very real.

So rather than telling women not to worry, listen to our experience. Understand why so many women relentlessly campaigned in this Chamber for change to make women feel safer by stopping the harassment and threats of violence in the first place. We should not accept a culture of violence towards women, we should not be complicit in covering it up, and we need to give women effective mechanisms to report what happens in order to expose the scale of the problem, call it out publicly, and punish those who perpetrate this culture of fear.

Reflecting on the past 12 months women have gone through in terms of their response to the challenges presented by coronavirus, at home women have been prominent in delivering on the frontline of health and social care, with two women professors, Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, helping to pioneer a global solution to the pandemic. In the US, Kamala Harris has become the first woman to be elected Vice-President of the United States, shattering another glass ceiling in the political world. Even closer to home, you, Madam Deputy Speaker, became the first woman ever to hold the role of Chairman of Ways and Means, bringing your infinite wit and wisdom to that important role.

While we acknowledge these significant milestones, the pandemic has brought existing inequalities into sharp focus too. Women have faced pressures in balancing work with home schooling and childcare. Domestic abuse cases have spiralled—up by 83%. When it comes to job losses, women have faced a heavy toll, with those aged 25 to 34 facing the highest unemployment rise. The Government’s mission of levelling up is very relevant to women. To mark International Women’s Day 2021, my message and hope is that a focus on levelling up for women is in place now more than ever before, both here in the UK and across the world.

We have record numbers of female MPs, yet still men outnumber women two to one in positions of power. A 50:50 Cabinet would help to ensure that women’s voices are heard where they need to be—right at the heart of Government. This week, as part of a whole host of International Women’s Day celebrations, we heard from the parliamentary archivist, Mari Takayanagi, about the remarkable contributions of early women MPs and the huge impact they had on law-making—how they spoke out 100 years ago in this place about the most sensitive of crimes against women, like FGM. These stories of courage can be seen in the work of women elected to this House today—women like my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), whose courage means that we have world-leading domestic abuse legislation and the Modern Slavery Act 2015, a blueprint for others across the world.

We need more women aspiring to become Members of Parliament, so I warmly welcome the Women and Equalities Committee’s inquiry looking at the actions taken on gender equality in the House of Commons. I hope that we can conduct a second gender-sensitive audit as soon as possible, with a body identified as being responsible for putting its recommendations into practice.

Above all, we need 2021 to be the year that we finally grasp the nettle of online abuse, which so badly affects women, particularly those in public life. We need the forthcoming online harms Bill to be more than a set of regulatory guidelines. We need laws that make it clear that online abuse is a crime, particularly with regard to posting intimate images online without consent. A safer, more respectful environment online will also lead to a kinder politics; I really believe that. In the meantime, let us stand up to those who gratuitously abuse women online—particularly women MPs and journalists—to help make sure that more women choose to stand for election and be leaders in our media too.

Women face barriers here in Westminster, but the same is still true of other sectors—in healthcare, for instance, where women account for more than three quarters of the workforce yet fewer than half have leadership positions. An out-of-date workplace with a presenteeism culture does little to support women, particularly when they have had children, so it was helpful to see the Birmingham Business School conduct research through the pandemic to show that flexible working can improve productivity. We need as a nation to adopt flexible working as standard, as part of levelling up for women and delivering a truly modern British workplace shaped around the whole workforce. We need to look closely at what Parliament should retain from the last 12 months of changed ways of working, so that we can play our part in modernising our workplace too.

In levelling up, we need to provide pregnant women and new mothers with better protections to stop them being pushed out of work simply for being pregnant. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that one in four pregnant women felt discriminated against in the last year. Outlawing pregnant women from being made redundant, as Germany has done, would help to stop so many women falling out of the labour market into low-paid work when they have children.

In this mission of levelling up for women, our voice on the global stage will be just as important. The Prime Minister has been a long-time advocate for girls’ education as central to levelling up for women across the globe. As the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office considers its new role, including championing international development through open societies, we need to continue to take forward this principled commitment to girls’ education, alongside the UK’s internationally acknowledged role in outlawing the other inequalities and abuses that women face—for example, abuse in conflict zones, forced marriage and the lack of a host of other basic human rights.

With the UK leading the G7 this year, there is a truly unique opportunity for our country to show leadership on the global stage in promoting gender equality. The UK Government ratifying the International Labour Organisation convention on violence and harassment—the first international labour instrument that recognises the right of everybody to work free from violence and harassment—would be an act of leadership and an appropriate start. Let us celebrate an astonishing year for women and call for a commitment to level up for women across the UK and across the globe, for a fairer society for everybody.