Porn sites a ‘gateway’ into child abuse

A leading expert on child abuse has warned that mainstream porn sites are lowering the “threshold of what is acceptable”.

Speaking to The Guardian, Michael Sheath warned that freely available online pornography is becoming an “entry drug” into child abuse.

He has been counselling men who abuse children for 33 years.

‘Dangerous’

Sheath expressed particular concern about the effect that pornography is having on the developing minds of younger men.

Abusers under 40-years-of-age will typically have been watching porn on the internet “at eight, nine, 10 years old”, he said.

Eventually, they go down a “potentially escalating pathway” that leads to an interest “in child molestation”.

He concluded: “Mainstream pornography sites are changing the thresholds of what is normal and I think it’s dangerous.”

Scale

Sheath also drew attention to the scale of the problem and the enormous number of indecent images of children online at the moment.

He said: “I’m counselling 10 men at a time – and the police are arresting 500 men a month.

“If they quadrupled the number of police looking at online abuse the number of images found would quadruple. The only limits are the number of officers put on it.”

Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection, recently said: “There have been year-on-year increases in reports of people accessing indecent images of children and as a service, we are searching more properties, arresting more suspects and safeguarding more children than ever before.”