Online porn 'is turning children into sex attackers': Young act out depraved scenes they see on web, says Deputy Children's Commissioner

Online porn 'is turning children into sex attackers': Young act out depraved scenes they see on web, says Deputy Children's Commissioner

• 'There isn't a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited,' Sue Berelowitz tells MPs
• Online porn is 'affecting children's thresholds of what they think is normal' leading them to 'enact' scenes from porn films
  
• Girls are being lured into parks by boys they meet online and gang-raped, she tells politicians
• Blocking computers is not enough - because children are now targeted via their mobiles

By James Slack and Charles Walford

PUBLISHED: 18:11 EST, 12 June 2012 | UPDATED: 05:52 EST, 13 June 2012

Girls as young as 11 'expect' to have to perform sex acts on rows of boys for up to two hours at a time in parts of London, a shocking report has warned.

Child abuse is rife across Britain with many of the depraved sex attacks being carried out by youngsters who have had their minds warped by online porn, a government expert said yesterday.

Deputy Children’s Commissioner Sue Berelowitz said there 'isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited’.

And she said easy access to ‘extreme’ internet porn was to blame as it ‘affected children’s thresholds of what they think is normal’.

Horrendous: Thousands of children the country are being sexually exploited, stunned MPs were told today (picture posed by model)

They are then ‘enacting’ scenes from porn movies â€" often as part of gangs which subject young girls to terrible abuse.

Giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee, Miss Berelowitz told of her great concern about what internet porn was doing to vulnerable young minds.

She explained: ‘We’ve had boys say to us â€" some of the boys I’ve spoken to who’ve been involved in sexual exploitation â€" “it was like being in a porn movie”.

‘They have watched things and then they’ve enacted them. It has definitely affected children’s thresholds of what they think is normal.’

In one vile case she uncovered, boys aged 14 and 15 were 'summoned' via BlackBerry Messenger to the gang rape of a 'very, very young girl' which lasted several days.

She told MPs: 'Boys were being called while some were raping the girl to say "come, come, come, you can join in too" and they were arriving and elbowing each other out of the way to rape her.'

And giving examples from the capital, she added: 'There are parts of London where certainly children expect to have to perform oral sex on line-ups of boys, up to two hours at a time from the age of 11.

And it was 'quite common' for girls to be lured via internet chat rooms to meet a friend, only to be met by a group of boys and gang raped in a park.

'Then another group of boys come, they take her to another part of the park and she is serially raped again,' Ms Berelowitz told MPs.

'I wish I could say to you that such things are uncommon but I’m afraid they are quite common.'
In another case, older men were using young male gang members as a 'front line' in a wider abuse network, and had even forced two of the boys to have sex and filmed it on a mobile phone to ensure their compliance.

The deputy commissioner, appointed to look after the best interests of children, backed the Mail’s campaign for controls to make it harder for youngsters to access pornographic images on computers.

Horror: Children are being targeted on Facebook - and in one instance word of a gang rape was spread by BlackBerry messenger. (Picture posed by model)

MPs, charities and this paper want a new ‘opt-in’ system â€" where access to porn is normally blocked by the internet service provider, unless parents specifically request otherwise. Miss Berelowitz told MPs this move would be the right way to make a ‘start’.

She said parents needed to recognise children could access porn from home computers and mobiles, and they alone would not be able to control successfully what young people could see.

Ms Berelowitz  said: 'Parents may think they can control what’s going on because they can have a blockage on the computer but the reality is children can get anything they like on their mobile phones.

'And they are. It has definitely affected children’s thresholds of what they think is normal.'

Currently, the opt-in system is being resisted by internet companies, who make millions from adverts for pornographic websites. Ministers, who have been criticised for their close ties to companies such as Google, have yet to reach a final decision.

Sue Berelowitz's report into the scale of child abuse is due out in September

Her comments will increase the pressure on ministers to take drastic action to protect children from damaging images online.

During her evidence she said: 'What I am uncovering is that sexual exploitation of children is happening all over the country.

'As one police officer who was the lead in a very big investigation in a very lovely, leafy, rural part of the country said to me: "there isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited".

'We should start from the assumption that children are being sexually exploited right the way across the country.

'In urban, rural and metropolitan areas, I have hard evidence of children being sexually exploited. That is part of what is going on in some parts of our country. It is very sadistic, it is very violent it is very ugly.'

The deputy commissioner told the visibly-stunned MPs that 'what is being done is so terrible that people need to lay asid e their denial' or risk victims being disbelieved.

Victims numbered in the thousands not the hundreds, she said.

She said she was 'extremely concerned' about the role being played by the internet in enabling and fuelling abuse, and ridiculed the idea that parents could prevent access.

Young people were acting out scenes they saw in online pornography and even organising abuse via social networking sites and messaging systems, she said.

One police force showed her a list of more than 1,000 girls aged between 12 and 14 whom a man in his 40s masquerading as a boy had managed to make his 'friends' on Facebook.

'We have gathered quite a lot of evidence to show that there is no doubt that social networking sites can be a source of real problems for this,' she said.

Her report into the scale of child abuse is due out in September.

Enlarge  

She also talked about recent high-profile cases of groups of men exploiting young white girls for sex.

In one case in Rochdale, nine Muslim men, mainly of Pakistani origin, were found guilty of plying girls as young as 13 with drink and drugs so they could use them for sex.

But while it may be true that some Pakistani men saw white girls as 'easy meat' - as suggested by a number of high-profile politicians - that was only one pattern among many, she said.

'I regret to say that there are parts of every single community - white, Pakistani, Afghan, Gypsy and Romany travellers, you name it - who are seeing children as easy access in terms of sexual exploitation. And in terms of victims we are seeing the same sort of profile.'

Ethnic minority victims were 'too often missed out'.

Speaking about the race issue, she told the committee she had visited a 'racist' estate in the north of England where there was routine sexual abuse of children within an all-white community.

'I have been to gang-associated areas in the north of England.

'I am thinking of one particular estate which is exclusively white, because it is such a racist estate, where there is a very strong and identified pattern of the white males on that estate sexually exploiting the white females on that estate.

'So it is really important to hold all of it in mind.'

Peter Davies, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre, has warned that children are accessing the web at a far younger age, meaning they could stumble across adult material.

His organisation is now distributing films to schools aimed at children between the ages of five and eight, to train them how to avoid online dangers.

In his evidence to MPs yesterday, Mr Davies said he would score the public sector only ‘five out of ten’ for its ability to protect children from abuse.

He claimed that, on average, one child in every 20 was the victim of sexual abuse.

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