WEB PORN TURNS OUR CHILDREN INTO SEX CRIMINALS
Fears over youngsters warped by the internet
ONLINE pornography is fuelling a rise in sexual offending by children, Scotland’s sex crimes ‘tsar’ has warned. Alison Di Rollo, head of the Crown Office’s National Sexual Crimes Unit, also backed the Mail’s drive to clean-up the Web.
As one of the country’s most senior prosecutors, she has been touring schools, warning children about the risk of being drawn into sex crime – and the dangers of falling victim to perverts online.
The Daily Mail’s Block Online Porn campaign has called for the most damaging images to be ‘filtered out’.
In an exclusive interview with this newspaper, Mrs Di Rollo said: ‘The availability and currency of sexual imagery on the internet, and the availability of that to young people, must have some effect on attitudes.’
Experts last night backed her call for tougher regulation and echoed her concern about the links between pornography and sexual offending.
Police and the prosecution service are growing increasingly worried
about children taking indecent pictures of other youngsters then circulating them – with the sender then at risk of becoming a registered sex offender.
Mrs Di Rollo said the proliferation of graphic indecent images online ‘coincided’ with more sexualised behaviour among children. ‘What we’re finding is that young people are using mobile phones to take indecent images of themselves and their friends.
‘We have very disturbing cases where that’s happening, with young people who are intoxicated, and with social networking sites, these images flow freely around their peers. In one disturbing case, there was a teenage party where two of the youngsters went off drunk and had sex and one of the friends filmed it on mobile as a prank – as a laugh – but those images were then circulated.
‘The consequences for him are that he will be a registered sex offender. Those are the consequences I am not sure that people are aware of.’
She added: ‘People are sexually active at a younger age in modern times and there has been a discernible increase in sexual offending amongst young people.’
In some extreme cases, children as young as 11 have been accused of carrying out rapes, Mrs Di Rollo said. Last year it emerged that a schoolboy of 12 raped a nine-year-old girl after he was allowed ‘unfettered’ access to hard-core online pornography.
Official figures show there were 295 occasions when youngsters between the ages of ten and 15 were ‘detected’ for rape or other sexual offences in 2011-12.
Mrs Di Rollo added that ‘it would be difficult not to conclude that the availability of hard porn has not influenced at least some people of that tendency, of that proclivity’.
The Mail’s Block Online Porn campaign has called for content filtering systems to be introduced on internet accounts. The prosecutor said she supported the campaign’s aims ‘as part of a whole raft of measures’. Last night, former police officer John Carnochan, now a violence prevention adviser at St Andrews University, said he was concerned about the ‘ready access to material which denigrates women’.
He added: ‘Young boys and young men see this and presume that this is normal; their expectations then are wholly skewed.’
Anne Houston, of the CHILDREN 1ST charity, said: ‘Viewing online porn can give young people a very skewed impression of sex and relationships.
‘We were surprised to find that more than 50 per cent of parents we surveyed had not set parental controls on online devices.’