Police Call for Changes to Protest Laws After Threats to MPs Over Brexit

Metropolitan Police commander Adrian Usher has suggested that there should be a move away from language such as ‘peaceful protest’ and to instead use the term ‘lawful protest’. This is as a result of growing threats being made to politicians as part of yellow-vest and Brexit-related protests when these protests are classified of peaceful.

It has been argued that many of the threat towards MPs would not be acceptable if said to people in other jobs and roles. Moreover, if such threats were made, action would be taken.

Source: The Independent

Digital Assistants, Privacy and Security

The Guardian has published a Long Read regarding the rise of digital assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, and covered the following emerging privacy and security issues:

Privacy: Privacy protection is considerably weaker after it is transmitted to the cloud and that, in American law, under the fourth amendment, if a person has installed a device that is listening and transmitting to a third party, then they have waived their privacy rights.

Attacks on devices: Researchers have shown that these devices can be hijacked using ultrasonic frequencies from a portable speaker, and can remain undetected by dimming the screen and lowering the volume. A hijacked device could visit a malicious website, place illegitimate calls and messages, and see and hear what is happening around the victim. These attacks present as security concerns, however could also have an impact on investigations, by altering evidence on connected devices, sending phoney messages, or to monitor, stalk and harass victims.

Ethics: There are ethical considerations as to what responsibility a company has to the privacy of their customer versus the moral duty to report to authorities anything concerning their devices capture. Similarly there is an ethical question as to when it becomes a company’s fault if their device fails to intervene to a situation.

Source: The Guardian

Community Cohesion and Hate Crime

The All Party Parliamentary Group  (APPG) on hate crime has published it’s report How do we Build Community Cohesion when Hate Crime is on the Rise?.

Hate crime predominately takes the form of verbal abuse or harassment, although it can vary within strands. LGBT+ victims, for example, tend to experience greater levels of physical assault, whereas individuals with learning difficulties often fall victim to financial or sexual exploitation. Hate crime remains massively under-reported both due to normalisation for its high frequency for victims, and also due to a previous lack of trust between affected communities and the police.

The report found that there was a clear desire to see a more consistent approach towards hate crime from police forces, particularly with regard to awareness training and community outreach.

It was largely agreed that current hate crime legislation is fragmented and creates a ‘hierarchy of hate’, where racism and religious hate crime can carry a greater penalty than LGBT+ and disability-related hate crimes.

Male Victims position paper added to Strategy to end violence against women and girls: 2016 to 2020

The Government have updated the Strategy to end violence against women and girls: 2016 to 2020 to include a paper on male victims. This is as a result of the number of men who are victims of the crimes covered in the strategy. It is also meant to encourage more men who experience these crimes to come forward.

As well as adding the Male Victims position paper, the Government have refreshed the original strategy to re-affirm strategic commitments as well as providing detail of the progress that has already been made.

Source: gov.uk

Parliamentary briefing on stalking and harassment

The Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology has published a new briefing on stalking and harassment.  The short publication describes the crimes of stalking and harassment and their differences, considers the effectiveness of approaches to identifying, preventing and prosecuting the offences, and highlights a range of victim support services and clinical services for perpetrators.

Source: UK Parliament

The Stalking Protection Bill – Third Reading Approved without Division

This Bill, sponsored by Dr Sarah Wollaston MP, aims to create a new civil Stalking Protection Order to protect members of the public from risks associated with stalking. It will now advance to the House of Lords. 

Source: Parliament.uk

Law Commission scoping report on abusive and offensive online communications

The Law Commission has published a scoping report on abusive and offensive online communications. The report concludes that online communications are criminalised to the same extent or greater than equivalent offline offending. However, it makes the following recommendations for reform:

• Many of the applicable offences do not adequately reflect the nature of some of the offending behaviour in the online environment, and the degree of harm it can cause.
• Practical and cultural barriers mean that not all harmful online conduct is pursued in terms of criminal law enforcement to the same extent that it might be in an offline context.
• More generally, criminal offences could be improved so they are clearer and more effectively target serious harm and criminality.
• The large number of overlapping offences can cause confusion.
• Ambiguous terms such as “gross offensiveness” “obscenity” and “indecency” don’t provide the required clarity for prosecutors.

It is believed those reforms would help reduce online abuse, as well as tackle “pile on” harassment where harassment is coordinated against an individual, and serious privacy breaches such as the sharing of private sexual images.

Sexual Harassment of Women and Girls in Public Places Report

The Women and Equalities Committee, after a nine month inquiry, have recently published a report on sexual harassment of women and girls in public places.  It follows the Committee’s earlier reports on sexual harassment in schools and workplaces.

In summary, the inquiry found that the impact sexual harassment has on women and girls is not routinely presented as a subject for men and boys to consider, that data is not collected on incidence and that laws and policy send inconsistent messages including the permission, by parliament, of pornography, sex shops, strip clubs and that prostitution is legal in some circumstances.  The inquiry further found that the damage of sexual harassment is far-reaching and can become ‘normalised’ as it is experienced continually throughout life, shaping the message that children receive about what is acceptable behaviour between men and women and teaching girls to minimise their experiences of abuse.  It also found that sexual harassment affects women’s behaviour, choices and freedom to be in public spaces as they feel the onus is on them to avoid ‘risky’ situations.  This in turn has a wider effect on society by contributing to a culture in which sexual violence can be normalised or excused.

Whilst the government has pledged to tackle sexual harassment as an equality and human rights issue, the inquiry also found that there is no evidence of a programme of work for achieving its goal of eliminating sexual harassment of women and girls by 2030.  An explicit reference to sexual harassment – the most common form of violence against women – is absent from the cross-departmental strategy for tackling Violence Against Women and Girls.

Key recommendations:

• A refreshed Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy which sets out a comprehensive programme of work to make all public places safe for women and girls. This programme must be informed by data collection on the extent and nature of sexual harassment in public places.
• Government use of available research evidence, commission of further research in order to inform work on causes of sexual harassment and how to prevent it. This should include a long-term, evaluated programme of public campaigns to tackle the attitudes that underpin sexual harassment.
• A new law on image-based sexual abuse to criminalise all non-consensual creation and distribution of intimate sexual images on the basis of the victim’s lack of consent rather than perpetrator motivation.
• Evidence-based approach to addressing harms of pornography
• Public transport regulations and policy preventing and tackling sexual harassment as well as blocking access or prohibiting public viewing of pornography.
• Amendment of Licensing Act guidance to ensure licensees take action on sexual harassment. Local authorities must consult local women’s groups and sexual violence specialists when deciding policies on licensing strip and lap-dancing clubs.
• Legal obligation on universities to outlaw sexual harassment through policy and to collect and publish data on the effectiveness of such policies.

Source: Parliament.uk

Family of Murder Victim Claims Against Police and NHS Dismissed

The High Court has dismissed a damages claim against police by the daughters of Ms Griffiths, who was murdered by a man, John McFarlane, after calling the police.  The daughters claimed that the call should have been graded as emergency, triggering an immediate police response, due to their mother’s previous complaint to police of harassment from McFarlane.  The court also dismissed a claim against mental health professionals for not having detained the man in hospital three days prior to Ms Griffiths’ death.  Mr Justice Ouseley ruled that medical staff had been under no duty to warn the police and Ms Griffiths that the man posed a danger.

Source:  LexisNexis [available with sign-up]

New Sentencing Guidelines for Intimidatory Offences

The Sentencing Council has published new definitive guidelines for intimidatory offences. These will be used in Courts from 1st October 2018.

The guidelines cover:

• Harassment
• Stalking
• Disclosure of private sexual images (revenge porn)
• Controlling or coercive behaviour
• Threats to kill

Source: The Sentencing Council