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United Kingdom: In one month 6% of children accessed the website Pornhub shocking new figures reveal.
More than 110,000 boys aged between 12 and 17 used a porn website in just a month, figures revealed yesterday.
A children’s charity is today warning that steps must be taken to shield children from internet porn after the shock survey also revealed that 6% of children aged 15 or under had accessed the adult website Pornhub over the course of a month.
Yesterday CEO of the NSPCC Peter Wanless said that porn sites have a legal duty to stop underage access.
He said: “The internet is a powerful tool that has brought some huge benefits to children and young people. But safeguards and education have not kept pace with technological advances. This ground breaking survey shows that many young people are viewing hard-core online pornography on a regular basis.
“These degrading and often violent videos can be just a few clicks away on PCs, tablets and smart phones sometimes without any age verification.
“This is something the NSPCC has been concerned about for some time and we know from contacts to our ChildLine service that it is having a big impact on young people’s views of sex and relationships and their behaviour towards other young people.
“Porn sites have a legal duty to stop underage access and we all have a duty to educate young people about healthy and respectful relationships so they don’t go looking for information in the wrong places. This isn’t about censorship or stopping adults doing as they choose within the law.
“This is simply about protecting young eyes from this material until they are old enough to make an informed choice as we do with alcohol and tobacco. We must not allow a generation of children to be guinea pigs for a mass experiment in internet freedom.”
Video-on-demand watchdog Authority for Television on Demand (Atvod) also said the Government must act to protect children from seeing graphic adult material.
Atvod said the matter was so urgent that it was “critical the legislation is enacted during this Parliament”.
The body commissioned market research firm Nielsen Netview to install equipment that monitored the online habits of 45,000 desktop PC and laptop users over December last year, with volunteers reflecting a cross-section of the population.
Of the wider population, 23% of those who had used the net over the month had visited an adult site.
Visitors to adult sites spent an average of 15 minutes looking at them during each visit and typically clocked up two-and-a-half hours of time in total over the month.
The regulator already forces UK-based sites to carry out age verification checks before explicit photographs and videos can be viewed.
However, the body said the vast majority of online pornography was downloaded from businesses based overseas, over which it had no control.
To tackle this, Atvod said it wanted all adult sites to request a licence that would only be granted if they had age checks in place. Payment processors would be ordered not to handle fees for premium services - such as higher definition or longer clips - from UK citizens to unregistered sites.
However, a spokesman for the government indicated it needed time to consider Atvod’s request.
“We will continue to work with industry and others to look at where further action could be taken, including around age restrictions,” he said.
-Mirror
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