Tuesday, June 26, 2012

'Terrible' threat to Britain's children

It seems to me that the Government has talked a lot about pornography on the internet and done precious little about it.

Sue Berelowitz, England's Deputy Children's Commissioner, who has been conducting research for a report due out in September, told MPs that sexual exploitation of children is happening all over the country, much of it fuelled by children accessing extreme pornography on the internet.

There were parts of London where children from the age of 11 expected to have to indulge in sexual activity with line-ups of boys for up to two hours at a time. It was "quite common" for girls to be lured via internet chat rooms to meet a friend, only to be met by a group of boys and gang raped in a park.

"What is being done is so terrible that people need to lay aside their denial."

She said children could get anything they liked on their mobile phones, which was affecting children's thresholds of what they think is normal behaviour.

A parliamentary inquiry revealed that almost one in three children aged 10 or under had seen sexual images online, and suggested that four out of five children from 14 to 16 access online pornography.

According to the Daily Mail website, hundreds of millions of pages on the web have sexual content, and British teenagers spend an average of 87 hours a year looking at internet pornography.

Only 37 per cent of families in the UK had set up any sort of parental controls on their teenagers' computers.

For the children's sake, something needs to be done about internet pornography. Now.