ALL women now live under the ever-present threat that anyone can own sexually explicit content of them; and so they are “sick and bored with their images getting used without their consent to misrepresent, degrade, and humiliate them”, Lady Owen (Conservative) told the House of Lords last Friday.
She was introducing the Second Reading of the Non-Consensual Sexually Explicit Images and Videos (Offences) Bill, a Private Member’s Bill to criminalise the creation and solicitation of intimate images of individuals made without their consent. These include “deepfake” images, using technology to place an actual person’s face right into a digitally manipulated scenario.
“Make no mistake: deepfake abuse is the brand new frontier of violence against women, and the non-consensual creation of a girl’s naked image is an act of abuse,” she warned. The current law was “a patchwork of laws that can’t keep pace”. The largest site dedicated to deepfake abuse had had 13.4 million hits every month.
The Bill seeks to future-proof ways during which the taking or “otherwise capturing” of a photograph will evolve over time. Lady Owen described her work with “Jodie”, whose fully clothed images had been stolen from her private Instagram page and posted on forums, accompanied by degrading captions and incitations.
The Government desires to introduce its own laws, after making a manifesto commitment to banning the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes, and has not supported the Bill. The Bishop of Leeds, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, found that inexplicable.
“[The Bill] is written as seen through the eyes of victims and survivors, which is an important orientation in framing it. It removes motivation as a test, since the incontrovertible fact that these images exist is enough, and motivation is all the time subjective and could be argued for ever. It also restores power to the topic of the photographs slightly than to the taker, which seems to me to be fairly essential,” he said.
“Human beings usually are not commodities. I do know that it sounds terribly Marxist to speak concerning the reification or commodification of individuals, but we usually are not commodities. It seems to me that girls suffer commodification whereby stuff could be traded without their consent, in any way that a producer desires. This is dehumanising.”
He continued: “We often hear that we’d like to raised educate boys and men.” Noting that 12 out of 15 of the individuals who had devised the “final solution” in Nazi Germany had earned doctorates, he said: “Education doesn’t guarantee virtue. That is why we’d like laws.”
Peers demanded urgency: “This problem is growing exponentially, and day by day we wait, potentially hundreds more women, after which tens of hundreds, can be affected. Waiting is just not an option,” Lord Russell said.
Lord Ponsonby, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State within the Ministry of Justice, agreed that it couldn’t proceed unchecked, but said: “We must act fastidiously in order that any latest measures work with existing law and, most significantly, effectively protect victims and produce offenders to justice. That is what our laws later on this session will do.”
Lady Owen concluded: “Any legislative vehicle that’s going to take a yr to pass, with an extended implementation period, is just not ok. I pay tribute to the ladies who discovered, within the worst possible way, where the gaps within the law are failing victims. I’m devastated by the Government’s refusal to back this Bill, and I do know that survivors will feel let down.”
The Bill is now to go to a committee of the entire House.
