Children are increasingly taking and sharing explicit images and videos.
A report from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said this is a result of a copycat culture, with 11-to-15-year olds mimicking celebrities who frequently share naked photos and videos.
The self-produced content often ends up on pornography websites.
Heroes
IWF Deputy Chief Executive Fred Langford said: “These are people they aspire to be in the future. It’s a very difficult thing to say ‘don’t act like your heroes’.
“The normalisation of this in the adult population is just being mirrored by kids.”
There is a worrying rise in the number of children filming or photographing themselves to share with friends.
Rise
The IWF report also found that the explicit self-generated content accounted for over a quarter of instances of child pornography.
Figures showed that in just one year, the number of cases involving ‘self-generated’ content rose from 349 to 1,717.