Ministers must stop online porn from warping young minds, a major report warns today.
Children as young as nine are being exposed to graphic adult material on the internet, a survey of 1,000 young people found.
Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said the pornographic material was having a devastating impact on real-life teenage relationships by ‘normalising’ sexual violence.
The research found four in ten of those aged between 16 and 21 believe girls ‘enjoy’ aggressive sex, such as strangling and slapping.
Children as young as nine are being exposed to graphic adult material on the internet, a survey of 1,000 young people found (file image)
Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said the pornographic material was having a devastating impact on real-life teenage relationships by ‘normalising’ sexual violence
And nearly half admitted they had personally experienced a degrading sex act -with frequent porn users 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 have viewed porn by the age of nine, rising to nearly half of 13-year-olds.
Dame Rachel said the research proved the ‘urgent’ need for the Government’s Online Safety Bill, which will enforce age checks on platforms hosting pornography.
But she warned age verification would not be a ‘silver bullet’ and that teachers and parents had a vital role in educating and supporting children to have ‘healthy, safe and consenting relationships’.
The Children’s Commissioner said top-shelf adult magazines which parents may have read in their youth were ‘quaint’ in comparison to today’s online pornography.
Nowadays, ‘depictions of degradation, sexual coercion, aggression and exploitation are commonplace and disproportionately targeted against teenage girls’, she added.
Dame Rachel said: ‘I will never forget the girl who told me about her first kiss with her boyfriend, aged 12, who strangled her.He had seen it in pornography and thought it normal.’
Rather than adult websites, Twitter was the site where the highest proportion of young people – 41 per cent – accessed sexual content.
Despite allowing users to set up an account aged 13, it is one of the few social media giants to still allow adult content, provided it is marked sensitive.
Some 79 per cent of respondents to the survey had seen sexual violence in pornography by the time they had reached 18, while more than a third had sought it out.
The report said it was ‘of perhaps greatest concern’ that young people were discussing ‘the influence of pornography in informing real-life sexual aggression and coercion’.
It added: ‘A young age of first exposure and frequent consumption of pornography were predictors in the likelihood of actively seeking out violent content for sexual gratification.’
The Online Safety Bill reaches the House of Lords tomorrow for its second reading tomorrow, giving peers their first chance to debate it.
Lord Bethell of Romford is bringing forward an amendment that would force adult websites to introduce strict age checks within six months of the Bill becoming law.
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 to codes of practice and guidance being drafted later.
The NSPCC said the survey’s findings showed Britain ‘cannot underestimate the sheer number of children of all ages being exposed to online pornography on a daily basis’.
Richard Collard, the charity’s associate head of child safety undangan menikah online policy, said: ‘The negative and long-lasting impact this can have on children and their views on sex and healthy relationships is deeply worrying and it is essential that the Government implements strong measures in the Online Safety Bill to protect them from seeing this type of content.’