'Stomach-turning material'
2:56 AM
Some of the children I spoke to - girls as well as boys - were accessing porn.
Disturbingly, some were deliberately seeking out some of the most stomach-churning material I have ever heard of - material I hope I shall never see - and sending links to each other to view it. As a joke.
It was material that made even this hardened foreign correspondent feel ill. While some of the worse stuff, involving extreme sexual violence, has been outlawed following a change in the law in January, much of it remains free-to-view and perfectly legal.
In the light of this, the 'sexualisation' of young teenage and even pre-teen girls through clothes, videos and music lyrics, and a possible link with sexual abuse and violence, is to be the focus of a fact-finding review ordered by the Home Secretary.
If children see this material around them, is it any wonder that they ape it when left to create their own content?
Search for the words 'porn star' on the popular networking site Bebo and the results include the profiles of more than 21,000 members. That represents the number of children and adults using those words on their sites.
Geoff Barton is the headmaster of King Edward VI School in Bury St Edmunds. He believes that children are living in a society with far too low a tolerance threshold for pornography.
Children are being sexualised far too young, he believes. This is contributing to the emergence of their online sexual behaviour.
'Any school that says it is not an issue for them is putting their heads in the sand,' he says.
'Parents are at a loss. We need to rewrite the parenting handbook.'
At one of his school assemblies, their head of IT reproduced some of the more provocative but clothed online images he could find of some of their pupils in order to shock them.
'We removed their heads from the pictures first to protect their identities, but they knew who they were,' says Geoff Barton.
'What they are doing is very, very reckless and dangerous. But it's all part of the "pornification" of a generation for whom the language and imagery of porn is used to sell everything.
Disturbingly, some were deliberately seeking out some of the most stomach-churning material I have ever heard of - material I hope I shall never see - and sending links to each other to view it. As a joke.
It was material that made even this hardened foreign correspondent feel ill. While some of the worse stuff, involving extreme sexual violence, has been outlawed following a change in the law in January, much of it remains free-to-view and perfectly legal.
In the light of this, the 'sexualisation' of young teenage and even pre-teen girls through clothes, videos and music lyrics, and a possible link with sexual abuse and violence, is to be the focus of a fact-finding review ordered by the Home Secretary.
If children see this material around them, is it any wonder that they ape it when left to create their own content?
Search for the words 'porn star' on the popular networking site Bebo and the results include the profiles of more than 21,000 members. That represents the number of children and adults using those words on their sites.
Geoff Barton is the headmaster of King Edward VI School in Bury St Edmunds. He believes that children are living in a society with far too low a tolerance threshold for pornography.
Children are being sexualised far too young, he believes. This is contributing to the emergence of their online sexual behaviour.
'Any school that says it is not an issue for them is putting their heads in the sand,' he says.
'Parents are at a loss. We need to rewrite the parenting handbook.'
At one of his school assemblies, their head of IT reproduced some of the more provocative but clothed online images he could find of some of their pupils in order to shock them.
'We removed their heads from the pictures first to protect their identities, but they knew who they were,' says Geoff Barton.
'What they are doing is very, very reckless and dangerous. But it's all part of the "pornification" of a generation for whom the language and imagery of porn is used to sell everything.
