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Peers demand urgency on tackling deepfake abuse

19 December 2024

Women live under threat that anyone can own explicit images of them, Lords hear

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ALL women now live under the ever-present threat that anyone can own sexually explicit content of them; and they are “sick and tired of their images being 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 people made without their consent. These include “deepfake” images, using technology to put a real person’s face into a digitally manipulated scenario.

“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,” she warned. The current law was “a patchwork of legislation that cannot keep pace”. The largest site dedicated to deepfake abuse had had 13.4 million hits every month.

The Bill seeks to future-proof ways in which the taking or “otherwise capturing” of a photo 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 wants to introduce its own legislation, 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 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 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,” he said.

“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.”

He continued: “We often hear that we need to better educate boys and men.” Noting that 12 out of 15 of the people who had devised the “final solution” in Nazi Germany had earned doctorates, he said: “Education does not guarantee virtue. That is why we need legislation.”

Peers demanded urgency: “This problem is growing exponentially, and every day we wait, potentially thousands more women, and then tens of thousands, will be affected. Waiting is simply not an option,” Lord Russell said.

Lord Ponsonby, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Justice, agreed that it could not continue unchecked, but said: “We must act carefully so that any new measures work with existing law and, most importantly, effectively protect victims and bring offenders to justice. That is what our legislation later in this session will do.”

Lady Owen concluded: “Any legislative vehicle that is going to take a year to pass, with a long implementation period, is simply not good enough. I pay tribute to the women who found out, in the worst possible way, where the gaps in the law are failing victims. I am devastated by the Government’s refusal to back this Bill, and I know that survivors will feel let down.”

The Bill is now to go to a committee of the whole House.

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