Pornography
Pornography pushing teens into watching child abuse images
Access to extreme pornography is driving a rise in harmful sexual behaviour among young people, from sexting to watching online child abuse.
According to one charity, there's been a 30% increase in under-18s contacting them and a 26% rise in adults contacting them because they're concerned about what a young person is watching and doing.
Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity which set up the Stop It Now helpline for adults now says it's getting more and more calls from teenagers.
As a result, the group have launched a new site called Shore which has a chat and email service for teenagers aged 13-18 who can get in touch anonymously.
Detective Chief Inspector Tony Garner leads a specialist online child sexual exploitation team at West Mercia police. He said:
Quite often when we go through a door following intelligence on someone watching or sharing child sexual abuse, we find a teenager. There is a crisis here and it’s being driven by young people having access to very extreme pornography that is changing their brains.
Online Safety Bill includes age checks on online porn
Last week, politicians passed the Online Safety Bill. Part of this new legislation will see age verification introduced for online pornography in a bid to curb the number of under-18s who watch it or stumble across it online accidently.
CARE strongly supports these new measures and the charity's chief executive Ross Hendry said:
Most younger children encounter pornography online by accident. Robust age verification measures will help prevent the youngest and most vulnerable kids being exposed to content that is disturbing and damaging to them. For older children, the impact of pornography is evident in the alarming rise of sexual harassment in schools. Our societal response to this issue must involve curbing young people’s access to porn. Pornographic sites glorify sexual violence and amplify toxic attitudes towards women and girls.
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