What are our kids exposing themselves to online?
In the wake of interest around Channel 4’s controversial ‘Sex Education versus Pornography’ series, new internet software solution CyberSentinel polled girls aged six to 15 to discover the truth about how they deal with porn and the effect that it has on them.
The hard hitting results revealed that almost a third of girls aged six to ten had accessed sites containing pornographic images. This compares to 36 per cent of 11 to 15 year old girls, who said that they had accessed pornographic images online.
An alarming 41 per cent of ten year olds surveyed confessed that they had viewed pornographic sites - and significantly 63 per cent of 12 year old girls admitted the same.
The most prolific group of girls who have accessed websites containing porn were based in London, where 57 per cent of those surveyed admitted accessing risky sexual material.
Shockingly, over half of the girls who had accessed porn claimed that they had intentionally accessed the sites themselves. The poll of 890 girls also found that 70 per cent did not tell their parents about the material they had viewed
One quarter of girls as young as eight said that they were made to feel more self-conscious, and this figure rose sharply to 40 per cent for ten year olds whose body image had been affected by the material. Nearly 60 per cent of 12 year old girls surveyed also said porn images online made them feel more body conscious.
Ellie Puddle of e-safety software CyberSentinel says: "As a parent myself, I know what it is like to presume that your kids will transfer the rules and guidelines you stipulate for them in the real world to the cyber world. But this does not happen automatically - parents need to be prepared to talk to children about their online world, to guide them on what is appropriate or not."
She continues: "Innocent or deliberate mistakes can be made by children that direct them to online material that is potentially negative. Parents can achieve positive parenting by seeking out e-safety software that will help their child continue to enjoy the many learning and development opportunities that the internet has to offer."