Chief Executive of Samaritans, Julie Bentley, responds to the recommendations from the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill
Responding to the recommendations from the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill, Julie Bentley, Chief Executive of Samaritans, said:
“The Bill Committee has rightly recognised the once-in-a-generation opportunity that the Bill represents to create a suicide-safer internet. We welcome the recommendations to explicitly include tackling illegal suicide content in the wording of the new law, and to enact the Law Commission’s recent recommendation that a new offence of encouraging or assisting serious self-harm with clearly malicious intent is created.
“We also need to ensure that adults are not left behind in any new protections: harmful suicide and self-harm content needs to be tackled across all platforms, regardless of their functionality and reach, for people of all ages. These changes to the Bill would make a real impact in reducing harm, while ensuring that people experiencing self-harm and suicidal feelings can still get the support online that we know is invaluable.”