An investigation into a disturbing playground craze involving coloured wristbands and sexual acts between children has uncovered a hidden online world of teenagers, sex and porn, a BBC broadcaster has revealed.
“Search engines such as Google make pornography available to teenagers at the click of a mouse”, said Miranda Sawyer, the presenter behind Radio 4 documentary, Sex, Porn and Teenagers.
Miss Sawyer warned: “Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can take silly crazes to another level. Not just because they normalise sex fads, make it seem as though every teenager out there is in on the game, but because they are web based and the internet is riddled with porn.
Normalise
“What used to be top shelf and over-18s only is just a mouse click away for today’s sexually curious teen.”
The presenter interviewed a number of young people about their experiences of sex and pornography.
One girl recalled how upsetting it was when a male contact bombarded her with unwanted pornagraphic pop-ups via MSN Messenger, an instant messaging service.
Another boy said he would rush straight to the family computer whenever his mother would leave the house, and admitted how easy it was to access porn via Google.
Miss Sawyer interviewed Lucy Emmerson, Principle Officer of the Sex Education Forum, who claims that sex education is the solution to the problem.
But academics and family campaigners say current ‘anything goes’ sex education is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Experimentation
Norman Wells of the Family Education Trust hit out at the Government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy saying: “With all its emphasis on sex education and handing out contraceptives to school children under the age of consent, it is giving them the green light to experiment sexually.”
Last year alarming statistics revealed that 21 girls under the age of 16 fall pregnant every day.
Dr Adrian Rogers of Family Focus responded to the news by blasting sex education.
Obsession
He said: “This obsession with compulsory sex education simply doesn’t work.
“We need to return to a combination of realistic education and empower youngsters to know how dangerous and foolish underage sex is.”
In February a university academic and newspaper columnist slammed the Government’s £280 million Teenage Pregnancy Strategy.
Abstain
Brenda Almond, Emeritus Professor of Moral and Social Philosophy at the University of Hull, criticised the Government for carrying on with the same policies to tackle teen pregnancy, saying, “instead of accepting its mistake and trying a different approach, the Government continues to cling to its discredited strategy of dishing out sex advice, pills and condoms.”
The Daily Mail’s Jan Moir says children should be told that any early sex is “just plain wrong”.
The emphasis instead has been, she says, on telling teenagers they can do whatever they want, with taxpayers left to “take care of the inevitable fallout”.
Failed
She says contraception has been liberally dished out “like lollipops to schoolchildren both under and over the age of consent”.
Yet, the columnist adds, it hasn’t worked.
She said: “By dint of tacit approval, it seems to have given young people the go-ahead to have sex.”