Toxic culture that infects our young

BACk in 2015, I spent a very uncomfortable afternoon with a man in an office in windsor. As chief executive of the now defunct Authority for television On Demand (AtVOD), set up by Ofcom in 2010 to monitor the editorial content of services available ondemand on the internet, his job was to watch hard- core pornography and identify any potential acts of criminality that might lead to prosecution.

Some of the stuff I saw haunts me to this day: girls with tears streaming down their faces as the most horrific sexual violence was visited upon them in the name of ‘adult entertainment’.

One film I watched involved one woman and five men and lasted 55 minutes. At the end of it she was barely conscious and had to have her head held up by her hair by one of the men for the parting shot.

this video alone had clocked up half a million viewers, 86 per cent of whom had clicked the ‘ like’ button. even more disturbing was the number of children who would have seen such a recording: according to a report published by AtVOD in 2014, in one month alone (December 2013), 44,000 primary school children in Britain, aged between six and 11, visited an adult website.

those 11-year-olds are now, of course, the 17 and 18-year-olds of today; it is not unreasonable to assume that some of them may well be caught up in the schools sex scandal. It is time to acknowledge what this toxic culture has done to a generation of young minds — and act before it infects the next.