Miriam Cates: Conservatives must take the lead in fighting child sexual exploitation online

Miriam Cates is a former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

Disgraced former BBC presenter Huw Edwards has been found guilty of making indecent images of children.

But despite his conviction, Edwards has escaped prison, leading to claims that he has been treated leniently thanks to his fame and status.

While such special treatment can never be ruled out – and there has been much recent evidence of a two-tiered justice system – Edwards received a sentence comparable to that of people convicted of similar offences involving child pornography.

So Edwards’ failure to be locked up is not a legal error, but it may be a moral one. The case raises important questions about whether punishments for online child sexual abuse are severe enough.

As we saw last summer, courts are not afraid to impose prison sentences for online crimes. But the distribution and possession of child abuse material is still seen as a ‘victimless crime’.

There is no evidence that Edwards himself is guilty of physically abusing a child.

Nevertheless, every image viewed or shared represents a real child somewhere in the world being abused. There is no such thing as “non-contact” child sexual abuse. The internet is facilitating an explosion of child sexual exploitation, with eye-watering volumes of illegal images and videos available – often for free – to those who know where to look.

This week I had the privilege of meeting US anti-trafficking campaigner Laila Micklewaite, who has been leading the fight against pornography website PornHub and is visiting the UK for a roundtable discussion with the Women’s Policy Forum. In Micklewaite’s words, PornHub is “not a pornography platform, it’s a crime scene”, with millions of videos of rape and extreme physical and sexual abuse. At its peak, PornHub was serving 4.6 billion ads a day to “users” and was the fifth most visited website in the world during the pandemic, worth $1 billion.

The pornography found on PornHub and other online platforms has nothing to do with the sexy magazines or racy videos of previous decades.

Online pornography is violent, graphic and degrading, depicting scenes such as gang rape, torture, incest and underage sex. With no requirement to verify the age or consent of participants before uploading content, millions of videos depict actual crimes, including rape and child abuse.

In her book Take Down , Micklewaite tells the story of a young Florida girl who was missing for a year and was saved when a Pornhub user recognized the girl’s face in a video and alerted her mother. 58 videos were found online of the girl being raped and abused for profit. There are many more stories like this. Thanks to Micklewaite’s campaigning – which included targeting financial services companies like Visa and MasterCard that facilitate payments to Pornhub – 91% of the videos on the site have now been removed.

But the international child abuse scandal continues to grow and has reached almost unimaginable proportions.

It is estimated that 300 million children worldwide are victims of online sexual exploitation and abuse each year. Children as young as two months old are being abused in countries such as the Philippines to daily for ‘clients’ in the West. And the volume of ‘self-generated’ child abuse material online is also increasing rapidly.

In 2022, the Internet Watch Foundation identified nearly 200,000 images of children manipulated to commit their own abuse. The most common category of children featured in these videos are girls aged 11 to 13, but images of children aged 6 and 7 are increasingly common.

Online child sexual abuse is every parent’s worst nightmare.

Nearly all British children over the age of ten have a smartphone with a camera, which is a potential portal for vile exploitation. And with social media platforms enabling interaction with anonymous users from anywhere in the world, paedophiles and predators have ample opportunity to manipulate children and profit from footage of their abuse. These videos can be sold around the world, uploaded to multiple websites and, as the Edwards case demonstrated, shared via WhatsApp.

Those who commit such abuse and those who create and distribute child abuse videos are criminals and deserve severe punishment. Platforms like PornHub and the infrastructure that supports them should also be held criminally liable if they profit from the rape and abuse of children.

But people like Huw Edwards who only view child pornography – the ‘end users’ – should also face severe sentences, because they fuel the demand for an international criminal industry that manipulates, rapes, tortures and enslaves vulnerable children in the most horrific conditions imaginable.

With the international illegal drug trade, we recognize that the ‘recreational user’ bears some responsibility for the exploitative criminal network that produces and traffics narcotics worldwide. Possession of a Class A drug can result in a prison sentence of up to seven years. The same principle should surely be applied to those who see themselves as ‘recreational’ users of child abuse material.

As with many issues surrounding child welfare, this topic receives far too little attention from politicians.

The Online Safety Act was the perfect opportunity to properly regulate online pornography, introduce tougher penalties for those who view and profit from abuse, and introduce effective age verification. But MPs have instead used the Act as a ‘Christmas tree’ on which to hang their own pet projects, and even the more robust child protection provisions of the Act – secured by a cross-party effort led by Lord Bethell, Sir Bill Cash and myself – are now being watered down by the regulator.

Conservatives should be deeply concerned about the growing problem of online child exploitation.

The depraved and corrupt nature of child sexual abuse – and the algorithms that increasingly entice men to view illegal content – ​​are a stain on our society. The long-term consequences of child abuse and porn addiction – both economic and social – are not yet fully understood, but will certainly be negative.

The party’s new leader has the chance to win over an army of concerned parents with effective policy proposals to protect their children. Measures to tackle child abusers are always politically popular.

Polls regularly show strong support for paedophiles to receive the harshest sentences of all criminals. Whether it’s weakening education or refusing to take action on smartphones, the Labour Party has been left behind when it comes to child welfare. The target is wide open for the Conservatives to become the Party of Child Protection at the next election.

It can be tempting to ignore the issue of online child sexual abuse because it is unpleasant and difficult to talk about. But when children’s lives are being destroyed in the most horrific way possible, there are no excuses.

It’s time for Conservatives to address this.

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