The most important thing you can do as a parent is have open and honest conversations with your child about the risks involved with sexting. Children also need more help to deal with these situations.” How parents can help protect their children “The Government and internet providers have a done a lot to restrict young people’s access to pornography and this effort needs to continue. She added: “Many girls are worried about how porn can make boys see girls and the impact this is having on attitudes to sex and relationships, with some saying it puts pressure on them to look or behave in a certain way. She said girls can feel under enormous pressure to send explicit images and there have been cases where young people have been exposed to “terrible intimidation and bullying”. It found that repeated viewing may make children “desensitised” to the damaging impact of pornography, with young people often seeing it as realistic and some wanting to copy what they have seen.Īnne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, said the NCS findings would be “extremely worrying” for parents. Separate research recently commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner for England and the NSPCC found that young people are as likely to see online pornography accidentally as they are to search for it. LGBT teens seem to watch porn more often – with 38pc saying they watch it at least weekly, compared with 22 per cent of heterosexual teens.Ī fifth of teenagers, 19 per cent, said they had seen porn by the time they turned 13, while more than half of female teenagers (53 per cent) feel that pornography has a negative impact on what young men expect from sex. One in five teenage boys (19 per cent) admitted to watching porn every day, while the figure was much lower for girls, at just 2 per cent. The survey also highlight the shocking extent to which young people watch pornography. Education on the issue is key and parents can play a leading role in making their children understand the risks.” She added: “The figures will be concerning to parents and suggest there is a growing attitude towards sexting as being an accepted practice. This can affect a child’s reputation at school, in the community but also later on in life when looking for future employment.” She said: “Explicit pictures can end up, intentionally or otherwise, in the wrong hands and can spread quickly across the internet. Internet safety experts say parents need to play a role in educating children about the risks, as indecent images can get into the wrong hands and spread quickly across the internet.Ĭarolyn Bunting, general manager of online safety organisation Internet Matters, told i that many children and young people do not see the risks involved in sending indecent images.
Most are sent through Snapchat (67 per cent), followed by Facebook (22 per cent) and Whatsapp (14 per cent), according to the survey. The figure rises to 45 per cent among girls aged 17. Teenage girls are significantly more likely to have received at least one – 41 per cent compared with 30 per cent for boys. Education on the issue is key and parents can play a leading role in making their children understand the risks. The figures will be concerning to parents and suggest there is a growing attitude towards sexting as being an accepted practice. More than a third of those who took part in the survey (36 per cent) also said they had received at least one explicit image, and 27 per cent had received more than one.