More children are seeing porn on social media

HALF of 13-year-olds have seen porn online, research by the children’s commissioner has found, as she demanded tough new age checks on social media and adult sites.

Dame Rachel de Souza said she was “deeply concerned” by the findings, which showed that one in 10 had seen porn by the age of nine and more than a quarter (27 per cent) had viewed it by the age of 11. She warned that exposing children to such material threatened to normalise sexual violence among a generation of young people.

Nearly half (47 per cent) of young people aged between 16 and 21 said that girls “expected” physical aggression, according to the survey of 1,000 young people supplemented by in-depth focus groups.

Dame Rachel said the Government needed to prioritise porn as a harm in the Online Safety Bill, which yesterday had its second in the Lords. This would mean social media companies and adult sites would have to introduce robust age verification schemes to prevent children from viewing porn within months of the bill gaining royal assent.

They would face fines of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover if they failed to do so, and bosses could also be imprisoned for repeat breaches of their duty of care to protect children from such online harms.

More children see porn on Twitter than even on adult sites. More than four in 10 (41 per cent) said they had seen porn on the site, compared with 37 per cent for adult sites, 33 per cent for Instagram, 32 per cent for Snapchat and search engines (30 per cent). Dame Rachel said: “It should not be the case that young children are stumbling across violent and misogynistic pornography on social media sites.”