Generation sexting: What teenage girls really get up to on the internet should chill every parent
3:01 AM
Generation sexting: More girls are posing provocatively - just for 'harmless fun' (picture posed by model)
Like a real porn star, Becky is heavily made up and lying naked on the bed as the camera flashes. She could be just another glamorous model as she poses provocatively with practised moves. But she isn't. Shockingly, Becky is just 17 and still at school. She's filming herself in a friend's bedroom in a large, detached house in leafy suburbia as her schoolfriends party downstairs.
Becky has not been coerced into this degrading behaviour. She is posing on her own, taking photographs of herself not for profit - but for attention. Welcome to the deeply alarming new world of privileged British teenagers who have a growing obsession with pornography.
I discovered this trend - one which will horrify parents everywhere - during a BBC Radio 4 investigation into online pornography.
As a mother of three daughters aged 15, 14 and 12, I am well aware of the pressures children face online, and the problems adults confront trying to help them navigate their way through them.
Indeed, it was my concerns about my children's online exposure that made me take a closer look at this secretive teenage social world.
It's a world - as I was to discover - where boys often boast about the size of their manhood and their ability to drink alcohol, while girls flaunt themselves shamelessly, apeing the adult behaviour they see around them on TV and in magazines.
My guide into this disturbing universe was a pretty A-level student. I'd come to talk to her and a group of sixth-formers - boys as well as girls - at their prestigious school about the impact that watching pornography may be having on today's youngsters.
I certainly was not prepared to hear they were also producing it.
