According to Mail online,
Studies show half of children over nine have seen graphic sex on the Internet
On a bed emblazoned with Hello Kitty images, 13-year-old Natasha poses for her best friend’s mobile phone camera.
With one knee on the bed, and the other off, she raises her bottom in the air and looks around at the camera with a pout, set off by the red feather boa around her neck.
Natasha likes what she sees. You can’t see her spots and her face looks thinner when she twists around.
So she posts it as her profile picture on Facebook, where more than a dozen of her 400 friends rush to post comments like ‘Ooh, nice a***’ and ‘Sexeee!’.
And why should she see this as inappropriate when millions of adults project an ideal image of themselves on Facebook.
It’s a statement of what we think is most important about us.
You have only to comb through the Facebook or Bebo profiles of a few of today’s young girls, many of whom look like soft-porn stars in training, to witness how many want to be seen as sexy.
Of course, what woman hasn’t got a faintly embarrassing picture of herself getting ready for the school disco and posing as she tried to find what being ‘sexy’ looks like?
But the stakes today are much higher. According to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the sexier girls look in their pictures the more likely they are to be targeted by adult predators.
The latest figures show the organisation received 6,291 reports from the public, website hosts and online moderators last year (until February 2010) — a rise of 880 on the previous year. Offences ranged from grooming children online to distributing images and sexual abuse.
HOW TO SHIELD THEM FROM PORNOGRPAHY
Don’t believe that your child won’t be exposed. Just because you’re vigilant doesn’t mean that other parents will be.
If your child doesn’t see porn at home, there’s a good chance she’ll be introduced to it by her peers.
Set up filters. As a parent, you are the first line of defence — and however uninterested you think your child is, it’s safer to put filters in place than assume they are not needed. The good news is that many filters are already built into phones, computers and search engines, so it’s often much easier than you think.
Explain that porn isn’t sex. Tell your daughter about the real meaning of sex — before porn gets there first. Start early and by all means be age appropriate.
But gently explain that porn is not making love in the way that an action movie does not depict what happens in real life.
Don’t over-react. If you discover your daughter has been watching porn, don’t tell her off or she’ll never talk to you about it again. Eighty-three per cent of teenagers don’t tell their parents after they’ve seen it because they’re terrified of the reaction.
More than 400 reports included men asking girls to live up to the images they projected online by performing sex acts.
So where do girls get the idea that they should parade themselves like pieces of meat?
And why do so many men think that children this age are ready, willing and able to turn these poses into reality for their sexual gratification?
Pornography is so woven into the fabric of today’s society — and in our children’s lives — that even the dolls on sale in toy shops come wearing fishnet stockings and stilettos.
Yet many parents refuse to acknowledge the role porn plays in sexualising their girls, let alone accept that their children ever see it. Even those with much older teenage girls maintain their daughters are not ‘interested’, barely know what porn is — or would tell them if they saw anything disturbing.
They also prefer to think that hard-core porn is to be found only behind a safety curtain of pay walls for which children need credit card numbers to access.
Middle-class parents, in particular, tend to believe it isn’t a problem in their homes.
However, even a 2005 study by the London School of Economics found that more affluent children are more likely to have their own computers, and tend to navigate further and more skilfully around the internet. They also spend more time on the web, have better online skills — and are well-versed at evading parental monitoring.
The study of 1,297 children also found that while 57 per cent of the over-nines had seen porn online, only 16 per cent of parents knew. One can only imagine how much higher the number is today, six years later.
Studies show half of children over nine have seen graphic sex on the Internet
With one knee on the bed, and the other off, she raises her bottom in the air and looks around at the camera with a pout, set off by the red feather boa around her neck.
Natasha likes what she sees. You can’t see her spots and her face looks thinner when she twists around.
So she posts it as her profile picture on Facebook, where more than a dozen of her 400 friends rush to post comments like ‘Ooh, nice a***’ and ‘Sexeee!’.
And why should she see this as inappropriate when millions of adults project an ideal image of themselves on Facebook.
It’s a statement of what we think is most important about us.
You have only to comb through the Facebook or Bebo profiles of a few of today’s young girls, many of whom look like soft-porn stars in training, to witness how many want to be seen as sexy.
Of course, what woman hasn’t got a faintly embarrassing picture of herself getting ready for the school disco and posing as she tried to find what being ‘sexy’ looks like?
But the stakes today are much higher. According to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the sexier girls look in their pictures the more likely they are to be targeted by adult predators.
The latest figures show the organisation received 6,291 reports from the public, website hosts and online moderators last year (until February 2010) — a rise of 880 on the previous year. Offences ranged from grooming children online to distributing images and sexual abuse.
HOW TO SHIELD THEM FROM PORNOGRPAHY
Don’t believe that your child won’t be exposed. Just because you’re vigilant doesn’t mean that other parents will be.
If your child doesn’t see porn at home, there’s a good chance she’ll be introduced to it by her peers.
Set up filters. As a parent, you are the first line of defence — and however uninterested you think your child is, it’s safer to put filters in place than assume they are not needed. The good news is that many filters are already built into phones, computers and search engines, so it’s often much easier than you think.
Explain that porn isn’t sex. Tell your daughter about the real meaning of sex — before porn gets there first. Start early and by all means be age appropriate.
But gently explain that porn is not making love in the way that an action movie does not depict what happens in real life.
Don’t over-react. If you discover your daughter has been watching porn, don’t tell her off or she’ll never talk to you about it again. Eighty-three per cent of teenagers don’t tell their parents after they’ve seen it because they’re terrified of the reaction.
More than 400 reports included men asking girls to live up to the images they projected online by performing sex acts.
So where do girls get the idea that they should parade themselves like pieces of meat?
And why do so many men think that children this age are ready, willing and able to turn these poses into reality for their sexual gratification?
Pornography is so woven into the fabric of today’s society — and in our children’s lives — that even the dolls on sale in toy shops come wearing fishnet stockings and stilettos.
Yet many parents refuse to acknowledge the role porn plays in sexualising their girls, let alone accept that their children ever see it. Even those with much older teenage girls maintain their daughters are not ‘interested’, barely know what porn is — or would tell them if they saw anything disturbing.
They also prefer to think that hard-core porn is to be found only behind a safety curtain of pay walls for which children need credit card numbers to access.
Middle-class parents, in particular, tend to believe it isn’t a problem in their homes.
However, even a 2005 study by the London School of Economics found that more affluent children are more likely to have their own computers, and tend to navigate further and more skilfully around the internet. They also spend more time on the web, have better online skills — and are well-versed at evading parental monitoring.
The study of 1,297 children also found that while 57 per cent of the over-nines had seen porn online, only 16 per cent of parents knew. One can only imagine how much higher the number is today, six years later.
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