Pornography driving UK teens towards child abuse material, say experts

Internet and technology
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From the people who have a hard-on for the online “safety” bill:

Child abuse experts and police are warning that access to increasingly extreme pornography is driving a rise in harmful sexual behaviour among young people, from sexting to watching online child abuse.

One charity that works to prevent child sexual abuse said there had been a 30% increase in under-18s contacting them, and a 26% rise in adults contacting them because they were concerned about the behaviour of a young person.

Rachel Haynes, a senior practitioner at the charity the Lucy Faithfull Foundation said that since lockdown their Stop It Now! helpline – originally designed for adults – has been called by more teenagers.
“As a service we have seen an increase in under-18s contacting us for support,” she said. “We particularly began to see it when we launched a chat service for adults during lockdown.”

As a result they have launched a groundbreaking website in the UK aimed at helping teenagers who are worried about their own sexual thoughts or behaviour.

The site is called Shore and is the first of its kind in Europe and one of only three in the world. It has a chat and email service for teenagers aged 13 to 18, who can get in touch anonymously.
One of the most alarming developments for the charity and for police has been the rise in minors watching or sharing illegal child abuse material.

Since 2020, about two-thirds of the young people who contacted the helpline have spoken about indecent images of children. At present, half of the young callers will be already known to police, but the charity wants to move to earlier intervention.

Haynes says: “A large proportion of young people we work with have downloaded child sexual abuse material – the pathways they reach that by are complex.

“Porn is a contributing factor – teenagers become desensitised to what they are seeing. Sometimes they have been groomed by adults, or have been sent illegal images during sexualised chats online.”

DCI Tony Garner leads a specialist online child sexual exploitation team at West Mercia police. He said: “Quite often when we go through a door following intelligence on someone watching or sharing child sexual abuse, we find a teenager. There is a crisis here and it’s being driven by young people having access to very extreme pornography that is changing their brains.

“I think this is a very important and much-needed project.”
Haynes hopes that Shore will change the lack of opportunity for talking about online harm.

“There is a stigma – young people don’t have spaces where they feel they can talk openly. Often when we speak to them it’s the first time they have spoken about it to anyone,” he said.

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yeah I saw this article. It’s just a bullshit excuse to blame porn

“Porn is a contributing factor – teenagers become desensitised to what they are seeing. Sometimes they have been groomed by adults, or have been sent illegal images during sexualised chats online.”

there’s no evidence that porn “desensitizes” you (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

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The problem is, the UK has a very nebulous term of CSAM/CSEM.

AI, books, drawings, selfies, you name it.

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Extending the definition of CSEM to include materials that do not include depictions of actual, real minors is beyond senseless. It confounds and boggles the mind, and I’ve tried to sympathize, empathize, everything possible to try and make sense of it, but every time I think I have it figured out and I go to bed, then wake up, I’m right back where I started.

At first I thought it was some half-baked assertion of social or mental effect, but that’s not true because it doesn’t motivate real abuse, and minor associations between those who possess FSM in addition to CSEM does not formulate a proper causal connection, in fact, based on most studies and what I’ve been able to gather, the majority of those who consume FSM or dolls do not consume CSEM.

It truly boggles the mind.

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“Hey, prisons don’t fill themselves!” -Some politician, probably

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It’s easy to blame porn when you ignore the inadequate sex education students receive at school:

Children need more and better sex and relationship education in England’s schools, to help them navigate the issues they are likely to face as they get older, experts have told MPs.

The Commons women and equalities committee heard that too few teachers in England have received training in how to deliver lessons in relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) since it became a compulsory topic in 2019.

Lucy Emmerson, chief executive of the Sex Education Forum, told MPs that young people reported that important issues such as power imbalances in relationships between boys and girls were often not being tackled in RSHE lessons.

“This isn’t something that you can just reel off some facts about. It relies on the confidence of a teacher to open up discussion to a diverse group and to manage some of those complexities,” Emmerson said.

“And not to just put a video on and think that’s going to do the job. Because, unfortunately, that’s what young people are complaining about, that sometimes that’s all the lessons are.”

Because RSHE was relatively new, “there haven’t been specialist teachers in the numbers that we need, there hasn’t always been space in the timetable or planning time, or the leadership support” in schools, Emmerson said.

Jonathan Baggaley, chief executive of the PSHE Association – representing teachers of personal, social health and economics wellbeing topics – said that untrained teachers would struggle to deliver lessons on highly sensitive subjects such as self-harm.

“There are ways to do that which could be damaging, in which you might instruct or even inspire practices of self-harm or in the context of eating disorders. Yet there are ways to do this incredibly safely and effectively.

“If teachers are not trained in best practices to have these conversations safely, they are not going to be able to choose materials which meet those principles as well,” Baggaley said.

Concern over the way primary and secondary schools can teach RSHE has caused the government to speed up its planned review into the guidance around the subject, with a public consultation expected later this year.

Much of the controversy has centred around allegations of inappropriate teaching materials involving LBGTQ+ and transgender issues used by external providers. But Baggaley said his association, with members in more than 8,000 schools, was not aware of widespread poor practice.

“If we want to tackle problematic materials the way to do it is through teachers having training,” Baggaley said.

The MPs also heard from campaigners representing parent groups, who warned of the “sheer volume” of pornography that was affecting young people, with parents powerless to stop it.

Tanya Carter, of the Safe Schools Alliance UK, called for a ban on smartphones among children and in schools.

“Once you’ve got smartphones in schools, every child in that school is only as protected as the least protected child in that school.

“It doesn’t matter what controls you’ve got on your own child’s smartphone, if another child in that school has no controls on their phone your child can be exposed to hardcore porn at lunchtime,” Carter said.

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Since Hentai is much more popular among the younger generation I can almost guarantee that a good portion of this is referring to Lolicon. It is just so common to joke about and readily available. Especially with many Vtubers and other content creators mentioning lolis.

It could of course be actual CSAM, but this just shows that using the same terminology muddys the water so much that nobody knows what is being talked about.

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Personally I assumed it was selfies and sexting.

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“Boy who cried wolf” effect. Obviously, in the story, the boy got eaten by a wolf at the end, but I would say that he deserved it. Heck, even without the wolf, I’d sooner hire an assassin named Wilfred to silence that boy even if there is no wolf. That way, he’ll be crying Wilf, instead.

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How did you manage to get from reasonable analogy to calling out a hit on a child in two sentences, lol

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Yeah, true. There is barely any differentiating going on in the realm of CSAM. If sexting between minors is considered the same as an adult extradicting images from children then this is wrong.

I think society as a whole is struggling to accept that children have their own sexuality that they explore. Punishing them with jail, or a criminal record for taking pictures of themselves is not helping anyone. Media always potrays the main offenders as adults, but around 60% of CSAM offences are comitted by children through sexting.

Some states even run campaigns where they guilt trip children for sexting. They are committing very serious crimes etc. No horny teen is going to take this serious.

We live in a society moment.

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Look. That Tenth Kingdom bit was genius, and I want everyone to know about it.

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