Sexual Offences Bill [Lords]

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Sandra Gidley (Romsey): I understand the motivation for these amendments, but they fail to achieve the stated purpose. We must not lose sight of the fact that clauses 6 to 9 deal with children under the age of 13. I have particular concerns about clause 8, which deals with sexual touching, and clause 9, which deals with inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.

To return to clauses 6 and 7, I start from the premise that it is difficult to accept that the acts they deal with involving such a young child can ever be regarded as anything but assault. The Family Planning Association suggested amendments that appear to provide a defence of consent for a child under 13. I have problems with that because I am not sure that a 12-year-old is in any position to consent to sexual intercourse—we are talking about full sexual intercourse now, not consensual touching, or any sort of touching. The Family Planning Association must have meant well when it proposed these amendments—which I notice no hon. Member has tabled—because its job is to deal with the practical side of providing advice on contraception and sexual health to young people. However, I was slightly concerned: if the association regularly comes across the problem of 12-year-olds having sex, that is something that unfortunately we have to face, but such activities should not be condoned in any way.

The amendments do not help with the consensual aspects. We should consider a different approach. In fact, the amendments provide a loophole. I might not

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have thought that prior to yesterday's briefing from the Metropolitan police. Clause 6 deals with the penetration with a penis of

''the vagina, anus or mouth of another person''.

There are no circumstances in which we would condone 12-year-olds engaging in that sort of sexual activity, or with the activities dealt with in clause 7. In yesterday's briefing by the Metropolitan police, I was struck by the fact that the officer opened by talking about children who are brought into abusive situations not by deceit, but because they think that what is happening in their family is normal. All children think that what happens in their family is normal. To offer a rather silly example, a friend of my daughter came to tea once and as she left she asked, ''Why don't your parents shout at each other all the time?'' She thought that it was unusual that we were not arguing. It is clear that a child might be unaware that she is being abused, because she does not know any different: for example, she might think that dad is being nice to her. She might not have any other framework within which to put what is going on. The amendments would make it impossible to bring charges in these sorts of cases.

Clause 8 raises a slightly different issue, because we are coming closer to criminalising what might happen naturally between young people, but again the amendments would not help. Let me describe a case of which I became aware some 30 years ago, when I was a teenager, before I had any idea that things like this happened. The victim was a four-year-old girl. Nobody knew that there was a problem until she went into her parents' bedroom one day when her father was getting changed. I have to tell it as it apparently happened. The little girl looked at her father and said, ''Why is your willy different to uncle's?'' One can imagine the cold shock and horror that must have passed through her parents. They did not panic, but gently questioned her, and it immediately became apparent that, unlike her father's, the uncle's penis had been in a state of considerable arousal when she saw it.

The long and short of it is that the problem was dealt with and the uncle lost his job. He was not a real uncle, but a ''friend'' uncle. The little girl looked forward to the times that he came to babysit, and there had been no awareness of any problem—the child had never said that she did not want him to come. She had been encouraged to touch the uncle in that way, yet it was not part of an assault. The amendments would not deal with that sort of situation.

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I hope that I have made the case for the amendments being withdrawn. I appreciate the spirit in which they were tabled—we are all struggling to find a way around the problem. I am becoming increasingly concerned that the issue is dominating much of the debate. There are a lot of other good things in the Bill, and if we can come to some sensible solution or compromise, I am sure that all Committee members will find that acceptable.

Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield): Mindful of what the hon. Lady has said and of the intervention of the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson), it seems to me that the amendments

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suggested by the Law Society present problems, as my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) acknowledged when opening the debate.

The first problem that the amendments seem to present is that they arguably allow a loophole for paedophile activity if it could be shown that an act was an act of seduction rather than of assault. I reassure the hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley), who probably does not need reassurance, that these and a host of amendments tabled this morning are designed to provoke discussion and to help us to see whether we can improve this part of the Bill.

There is no doubt that the Bill presents some problems. The basic problem is that although sexual activity with a child under 13 is already contrary to law, the penalty consequences are nothing like as draconian as we are about to make them. There is something stark about the maximum penalty of life imprisonment that could be imposed, when one considers that some of the activities could well be, as my hon. Friend the Member for Woking so rightly described, consensual sexual activity between two young people or children of the same age—12 and three quarters, or 12 and 11 months, for example.

On the face of it, unless printed guidelines are available, it will be possible for prosecutions to be mounted and for penalties ranging up to life imprisonment to be imposed. The state is taking draconian powers of sanction for a range of sexual offences in respect of which there were previously rather limited powers of punishment—although that latter fact has been the subject of considerable complaint. There are numerous examples of somebody being convicted for this type of activity, but it was consensual and not rape, and that person receiving a remarkably lenient sentence, which has excited public anger, wrath, and in the case of the tabloid press, a lot of foaming at the mouth. There is a very real difficulty.

Is there any way in which we can improve the position? There are two approaches: one, reflected in the amendments that we tabled to provoke the debate, asks whether we should differentiate between different types of sexual activity and whether those activities are consensual or involve an assault. If they involve an assault, most people would agree that there are few problems in classifying that as a serious matter. However, it is difficult to see the dividing line if the act is one of seduction of someone who is immature: one has to ask, as the hon. Member for Romsey said, whether consent can properly be given.

To make the position clear, amendments to this group of clauses, 6 to 9, are designed to provoke debate rather than to propose a solution. Another possible course of action is to consider spelling out differential penalties in the Bill, but I accept that that, too, presents difficulties. One is constantly trying to work one's mind round the different circumstances in which criminality could occur, but we will have to try to do that.

Straying slightly from the current group of amendments, when we reach clauses 10 to 15, which deal with child sex offences, the issue will become even

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starker. Although the penalties are slightly different, they are similarly draconian, and people will start to feel even more uneasy if they apply to consensual activity between young people of roughly the same age. We will return to that matter later.

I accept that there is a basic principle, which the Committee may decide to stick to, that for a child under 13 no activity should be tolerated with anyone. If we start to introduce exceptions, we may get ourselves tangled up in knots and provide the very loopholes that we want to avoid.

Julie Morgan (Cardiff, North): I am pleased that this subject has been introduced at the beginning of this debate, because I share the view of the hon. Member for Romsey that it may be diverting us away from the important questions of how to deal with serious sexual abusers.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal of concern among children's charities and the Family Planning Association about the proposition that any form of consensual sexual activity between under-16s should be criminalised. A provision to make it clear that that is not the intention behind the Bill might be one way to go. It is difficult to find a solution, and the proposed amendments do not provide it for some of the reasons already mentioned. Mention of assault could exclude some of the activities that we were shocked to hear about in last night's police presentation. The amendments are not correct, but I hope that the Government will come up with a form of words that makes it clear that the provisions do not apply to consensual sexual behaviour between teenagers.

If that does not happen, the Bill will send out a message that works against all that has been achieved in tackling teenage pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. We need a climate of openness and education to tackle those problems, but the Bill tends to push us towards secrecy for young people under 16. Furthermore, we must accept that sexual behaviour is different from what the Committee might wish. On average, boys have their first sexual experience at 13 and girls at 14. How does that affect the clauses that deal with under-13s? We must deal with reality.

 

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Prepared 11 September 2003