Ministers are told we MUST protect children from online porn

Ministers must stop online porn warping young minds, a major report warns today.

Children as young as nine are being exposed to adult graphic material on the internet, according to a survey of 1,000 young people.

Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said pornographic material had a devastating impact on real-life relationships between teenagers by “normalizing” sexual abuse.

Research found that four in ten people aged 16 to 21 think girls “enjoy” aggressive sex, such as choking and slapping.

Children as young as nine are being exposed to adult graphic material on the internet, according to a survey of 1,000 young people (file image)

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Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said pornographic material had a devastating impact on real-life relationships between teenagers by “normalizing” sexual abuse.

And nearly half admitted to having personally experienced a degrading sex act – frequent porn users being the most likely to have done so.

Children are ‘frequently exposed’ to violent pornography – most of it perpetrated against women, the report reveals.

And one in ten children has watched pornography by the age of nine, which is nearly half of 13-year-olds.

Dame Rachel said the research proved the “urgent” need for a Government Online Safety Bill, which will impose age controls on platforms hosting pornography.

But she warned that age verification would not be a “silver bullet” and that teachers and parents had a vital role in nurturing and supporting children to have “healthy, secure relationships and consenting”.

The Children’s Commissioner said the high-end adult magazines parents may have read in their youth were “weird” compared to today’s online pornography.

These days, “depictions of degradation, sexual coercion, assault and exploitation are commonplace and disproportionately targeted against adolescent girls,” she added.

Dame Rachel said: ‘I will never forget the girl who told me about her first kiss with her 12-year-old boyfriend who strangled her. He had seen it in pornography and thought it was normal.

Rather than adult websites, Twitter was the site where the highest proportion of young people – 41% – accessed sexual content.

Although it allows users to create an account from the age of 13, it is one of the few social media giants that still allows adult content, as long as it is marked as sensitive.

Some 79% of survey respondents had seen sexual violence in pornography by the time they turned 18, while more than a third had sought it out.

The report said it was “perhaps most concerning” that young people were discussing “the influence of pornography in reporting on actual sexual assault and coercion”.

He added, “A young age of first exposure and frequent pornography consumption were predictors of the likelihood of actively seeking out violent content for sexual gratification.”

The Online Safety Bill will reach the House of Lords tomorrow for its second reading tomorrow, giving the peers their first chance to debate it.

Lord Bethell of Romford is proposing an amendment that would require adult websites to introduce strict age controls within six months of the bill coming into force.

Backed by 14 charities including the NSPCC and Barnardo’s, he warns the bill is too weak in its definition of age verification and leaves too much room for codes of practice and guidelines to be drafted later .

The NSPCC said the survey results showed Britain “cannot underestimate the number of children of all ages exposed to online pornography on a daily basis”.

Richard Collard, the charity’s associate child safety online policy manager, said: ‘The negative and lasting impact this can have on children and their views on sex and healthy relationships is profoundly worrying and it is essential that the government implement strong measures in the Online Safety Bill to prevent them from seeing this type of content. »