Entire year groups of young teenage children in schools have watched adult pornography, the children’s watchdog has warned.
Deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz said that she had found that some boys felt they had an ‘absolute entitlement to have sex with girls, any time, any place, any where, with whomsoever they wished’.
Sue Berelowitz, deputy children’s commissioner, suggested that the scale of access to adult pornography among children is now so widespread that it should trigger “moral panic” among parents, schools and the Government about what should be done.
Unpublished research by the Children’s Commissioner into access to adult pornography among children is much more widespread than previously thought, with every boy and half the girls in a year group of 14-year-olds accessing pornography in one school in England.
She said: “We came across one study where they were looking at the whole cohort of year nine pupils within a large local authority in England
“The findings were that 100 per cent – that is every single year nine boy – 14 year olds – is accessing pornography. And about 50 per cent of the girls. The girls did not want to look at the porn – they were being made to by the boys.”
The Commission had found evidence that children as young as 11 had been found actively to be “seeking out pornography”, she said.
Some boys now felt they had an “absolute entitlement to have sex with girls, any time, any place, any where, with whomsoever they wished”.
The watchdog was so concerned that it had more research to see if boys actually understood what “giving consent” to sex actually meant.
She said: “We have commissioned research into young people’s understanding of consent… It raises very serious questions about whether boys in particular have any understanding of the concept of consent.”
Miss Berelowitz added: “No one should be panicking – but why should not there be a moral panic?
“Because what we are uncovering is that the scale of what this is doing to children and young people’s sense of what is reasonable.
“If that does not generate some huge moral anxiety amongst us as a responsible population, government and communuity then quite frankly I would be very worried.”
The findings emerged on BBC Radio Four’s Bringing Up Britain, which is examining “parenting and pornography”.
Claire Perry MP, an adviser on pornography to David Cameron, told the programme that children accessing adult sex websites should be treated like a “public health issue” among parents, such as an outbreak of nits at school.
Perry said children accessing porn had to be treated like a “public health issue”.
She said parents had to treat children watching porn as like an outbreak with nits and tell other parents about the problem.
She said: “It is a bit like when your children get nits – you have to tell the parents with whom the child had seen the pornography.
“One of the worst things is that parents are so shocked and ashamed that they find it difficult to talk to their children, let alone the other parents.”
Parents should contact others, saying “my child has seen porn, he may have sent it round his classmates, please can we all get together and talk about it”, she said.
She added: “We are very scared to do that as parents we shouldn’t be – it is a public health problem, I think in a way.”
Miss Perry said she wanted to see “better filtering” of sites by internet service providers, which could not be circumvented by tech-savvy children.She said that it was up to parents to take back control of the internet, in the same way that children are not allowed to drive a car until they grow up.
She added: “This sense that we have ceded the digital space to our children is really interesting because if your children said ‘actually mum I want to go and drive the car’ or ‘I would just like to eat crisps and chocolate for every meal’, we would feel we had some level of responsibility or some ability to control those decisions.
“And somehow it has been made very difficult for us to feel we have the same ability to intervene in the online space.”
Part of the problem was that “we – Government and industry – have made it very difficult to protect everything in the home with one click”, she said, adding that parents should feel able and willing to control internet access by “turning off the router in the house”.
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