The Mail’s warned for years about internet porn warping young minds. Now the chilling proof’s being played out in classrooms...
HEADING to the school canteen, 14-year-old Claire Evans decided to pop into her classroom to drop off some books in her locker. In the room was a boy in her year she knew well. So when she heard the door click shut she assumed it was him leaving. What happened next could not have come as more of a shock. ‘he came up behind me and tried to kiss me,’ she said. ‘he pushed me against the locker and started trying to putting his hand up inside my shirt. I was pushing him away and struggling but he was much stronger than me.’
Mercifully, the attack was stopped by another boy coming into the room — with whom the first boy started joking that they had simply been ‘getting off’ with one another.
Shaken by what had happened, Claire did not know what to do, fearing that no one would believe her if she reported the assault. So instead, she kept quiet for two years — until she started having panic attacks, and finally confided in a teacher about what had happened. But by then the boy had left the school in South-East England, and Claire was simply given advice on how to keep herself safe in future.
‘I felt like I wasn’t taken seriously,’ said Claire, whose name has been changed to protect her identity. ‘It’s as if because we were just children and were the same age, it didn’t really matter.’ She is not alone in feeling both overlooked and ignored.
Of the 200,000 cases of child sex abuse believed to take place every year, the NSPCC estimates that at least one-third are carried out by other children. Of course, as with Claire, only a fraction of these assaults will ever be reported.
But even so, newly released statistics reveal just how big a problem so-called peer- on- peer sex assaults have become. Figures obtained from police forces across England and Wales by BBC’s Panorama programme show that the number of reported sexual offences committed by children against other youngsters rose from 4,603 in 2013 to 7,866 last year. That’s an increase of 71 per cent.
While some of this may be due to greater awareness of what constitutes sexual abuse, experts are treating this as a serious problem — and one driven by the easy availability and widespread consumption of pornography by the under-18s.
‘We are dealing unequivocally with the tip of the iceberg,’ says Simon Bailey, the chief constable of Norfolk and the child protection lead at the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
‘We have a generation of young people who are being exposed to pornography in a way you were never able to access before. As a result, we’re seeing an increasing number of referrals around harmful sexual behaviour, and more sexual abuse among peers.
‘I think this is being driven by a view held by young people that what they are seeing in pornographic videos is a healthy relationship.
‘But this is a very distorted view of what a healthy relationship is.’
There is little doubt that teenagers are being exposed to more pornography, of a more extreme nature, than ever before. Accessed on the internet via laptops and smartphones, its pervasiveness is all-too apparent.
ASTUDY in June 2016, by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, the NSPCC and Middlesex university found that 53 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds had viewed online pornography. Broken down, the figures showed that 28 per cent of 11 to 12-year-olds had watched porn, rising to 65 per cent of 15 to 16-year-olds.
Boys were more likely to have seen it than girls — and more likely to have actively sought it out, rather than stumbling across it on the web.
The study, the largest of its kind, also found that while they might be shocked, confused or disgusted when they first saw pornography, the more they viewed it the more likely they were to become aroused or excited.
Further, it also suggested that what they saw was shaping their behaviour — 42 per cent of 15 to 16-year-olds said that porn had given them ideas of sexual practices that they would like to emulate. Again, that applied more to boys than girls.
Some of those also expressed concern about how porn affects the way boys saw girls, and their attitudes towards sex and relationships.
‘It can make a boy not look for love, just look for sex, and it can pressure us girls to act and look and behave in a certain way before we might be ready for it,’ said one 13-year-old girl.
A 14-year-old added: ‘It teaches people about sex and what it is like to have it — but I think it teaches people a fake understanding of sex; what we see on these videos isn’t what actually happens in real life.’
Another girl of 13 observed: ‘It puts me off having any future relationships as it is very male-dominated and not romantic or trusting.’
Boys were even more frank about the impact. ‘Boys become a different person — and begin to think it is all right to act and behave in such ways,’ said one 14-year-old. ‘The way they talk to others changes as well. When they look at a girl, they are probably only thinking of that one thing, which isn’t how women should be looked at.’
MEANWHILE, with shocking casualness, one 13- year- old boy commented: ‘One of my friends has started treating women like he sees on the videos — not major — just a slap here or there.’
The impact was also noted last year in a report into sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools, published by the house of Commons’ Women and Equalities Select Committee.
having taken evidence from a range of experts, it concluded: ‘ There is evidence of a correlation between children’s regular viewing of pornography and harmful behaviours. The type of pornography many children are exposed to is often more extreme than adults realise.’
And it is not hard to find real-life evidence of the link.
As the Mail reported on Monday, last week 19-year- old William Nicholson was sent to a young offenders’ institution for six years for repeatedly raping a child. he was 14 when he started abusing his victim, and the court heard he had started watching online pornography at the age of 12.
Judge Peter Armstrong said this had had a ‘ serious deleterious effect’ on the teenager, and that the case served as ‘ a warning to parents to monitor their children’s activities rather than them being left to their own devices in their bedrooms’.
In August, a 12-year-old boy was convicted at Brighton youth Court of raping his four-year- old sister. he had assaulted her while playing hide-andseek, and then bribed her to keep quiet with a bag of Skittles.
The court was told that large amounts of porn had been found on his phone. The case was adjourned for sentencing to allow experts to assess what risk the boy poses to the public.
last summer, meanwhile, a court in Cheltenham heard how a 12-year-old boy repeatedly raped his nine-year-old sister after becoming obsessed with hardcore porn. The boy assaulted her
after searching the web for the material, telling her that ‘she wouldn’t be his sister any more’ if she didn’t have sex with him.
Prosecutor Ian Fenney said that ‘cases of this nature will increasingly come across the court’ because of the access young people have to hardcore pornography. Placed in a supervised treatment unit, the teenager was banned from seeing his sister and given a 12-month referral order.
In another case, heard in Lancashire, a 12-year-old who admitted raping his seven-year- old sister told police he had watched hardcore material via the internet on an Xbox video games console, and ‘decided to try it out’. He walked free from court after a judge was given a letter from the victim, who said she was ‘sad’ about what he had done to her but did not want him locked up.
Of course, assaults such as these — an older child targeting a younger sibling — are not new.
But police and experts say that what has changed recently is the role pornography is now playing in sex attacks by children on children. While the number of sexual offences is rising across all ages — the recent figures show offences by children aged ten and under had more than doubled from 204 in 2013-14 to 456 in 2016-17, with the youngest involving a five-yearold boy accused of sexual activity with a girl under 13 — the big area of concern is what is happening in the teenage population.
‘This is about an emerging problem in the way in which children and young people are being sexualised, and particularly about the influence of pornography on young people’s sexual development in this crucial stage of their childhoods and adolescence,’ says Simon Hackett, professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University.
‘The vast majority of young people look at pornography online. This is shifting the way in which young people are behaving. What they see is a particular type of sex that portrays men as aggressors and women as passive, and it nor- malises particular types of sexual behaviour. They are being conditioned by what they see online and many will therefore take their cues in real life from the kind of behaviour they are seeing online.’
He adds: ‘We have a major problem on our hands. What we are worried about is that we have got communities of young people who, collectively, are being influenced by the negative stimuli and negative influences of pornography, whose rules of behaviour seem to be changing or have changed.’
Police chief Simon Bailey agrees. ‘By far the most prolific form is peer-on-peer abuse.’
Some will take place at schools. Indeed, the latest figures show that since 2013 there have been 2,625 reported sexual offences — including 225 alleged rapes — carried out by under-18s on other children on school premises, including primary schools.
Take the case of a 15-year- old girl who told the Panorama documentary how a fellow pupil had moved from sending messages telling her he liked her to pester- ing her for nude pictures, to assaulting her in an art class.
‘I was talking to friends and I felt him come close to me. He put his hand down my skirt,’ she said. He then indecently assaulted her.
She reported him to police, only to find herself the victim of a bullying campaign. She was labelled a ‘liar’ and a ‘grass’ online, while a friend of her attacker’s told her: ‘He should have raped you.’ In the end, she moved schools. The boy was never prosecuted.
Another 14-year-old girl told the documentary that she’d had a sexual relationship with a boy in her class before they broke up. He would then try to touch her in class, and said teachers would sometimes move him or ask him to leave the classroom before giving up. She was later raped by the boy at a house party, and was assaulted by him again a year later. He was never charged.
Such failure to bring a criminal prosecution is not unusual. Of the cases reported to police, 74 per cent resulted in no further action.
OTHER teenagers to have suffered include a 1 3 - yea r- old girl assaulted in a park by fellow pupil. His behaviour changed markedly after he started looking at porn.
‘He was really good with technology, computers, mobiles, laptops — everything like that,’ she said. ‘ He started viewing porn. I think he watched it before he met me because he always talked about it with other friends. There were always jokes about it.’
She chose to ignore his sexual talk until one day she found herself alone in a park with him after school. He cornered her and forced himself on her sexually.
‘even if he was not addicted to porn, he was influenced by it and thought it was OK to do what he did on some level,’ she said.
To counter such behaviour, experts want more effective sex education at schools. Many also believe it’s essential to control access to online porn — something the Government has vowed to do.
‘Until we really invest in sex education in schools, and until there is regulation around access to pornography, I cannot help but think these figures will continue to rise,’ warns chief constable Simon Bailey. ‘It cannot be right that a 15-year-old can’t place a bet because of age verification, but if they want to go online and look at pornographic material there is nothing to stop them.’
It is a scandal — and a scandal with the capacity to taint for ever the lives of tens of thousands of young children across the nation.