A 'guinea pig’ generation of children is growing up addicted to hardcore internet pornography, MPs were warned last night.
Four out of five 16-year-old boys and girls regularly access porn online while one in three ten-year-olds has seen explicit material, a disturbing cross-party report reveals.
It also cites figures showing that more than a quarter of young patients being treated at a leading private clinic are receiving help for addiction to online pornography.
Disturbing: The cross-party report reveals four out of five 16-year-olds regularly access porn websites
There are fears that the rise of internet pornography is leaving teenagers unable to maintain normal relationships and even increasing their susceptibility to grooming by sexual abusers.
Yesterday the backbench Tory behind the study, Claire Perry, demanded that internet providers offer parents a simple way of filtering out adult content.
Even very young children can accidentally stumble across pornography, the report for the Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection said.
David Cameron told MPs yesterday that he had called technology firms together to offer a ‘choice of blocking all adult and age-restricted content on their home internet’.
But the Prime Minister has been left frustrated by the unwillingness of the major internet service providers to force new customers to ‘opt in’ to adult content as opposed to the current system of ‘opting out’ by installing their own filters.
And Tory MP Andrea Leadsom revealed that her own son had told her that ‘handing around very hardcore porn on memory sticks is absolutely rife at his school’. The mother of three fears regulators are ignorant about the availability of porn through internet-ready TVs, calling the internet a modern-day ‘Wild West’.
Over 60 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds have internet access in their own rooms, compared with 30 per cent six years before. Alarmingly, 41 per cent of seven to ten-year-olds can access the internet from their own rooms, more than a fourfold increase on previous figures.
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