The government study titled "'Sex is kind of broken now': children and pornography," shared by the U.K. children's commissioner, found that more than half of children – as young as six years old – who are exposed to pornography come across it accidentally on social media.
"This report is among the most sobering my office has ever published," Dame Rachel De Souza, the U.K.'s children's commissioner, writes in the opening paragraph.
LifeSiteNews describes this revelation as "yet another devastating indictment of a society profoundly shaped by the porn industry and permitted by adults who value sexual libertarianism over the health, innocence, and safety of children."
Daniel Weiss, president of Sexual Integrity Leaders, agrees.
"I think parents have been a little asleep at the wheel, not realizing how dangerous social media has become," he tells AFN.
He notes its documented impact on kids' attention spans and its contribution to cyberbullying, but even Weiss is alarmed by these findings about pornography on normal social media sites.
"It's not just any pornography," according to Commissioner De Souza. "It is violent, extreme, and degrading often portraying acts that are illegal – or soon will be."
"I hope it helps parents wake up to the dangers that are really out there," Weiss says of the report.
He knows parents are under a lot of pressure to give their young kids phones. And though he recognizes there are some good reasons for that, Weiss is also aware that children's brains are not developed enough to safely handle all the information phones bring to them.
"Social media is really rife with all kinds of problems that lead to problematic behaviors in kids: anxiety disorders, bullying, depression, even suicide ideation," Weiss relays. "There's a lot of pressure on kids to conform to what looks to be the normal world to them. Adults know that's not the normal world, that the virtual world operates differently, but kids don't make that distinction."
He says technology is shaping the brains of children, and a lot of tech leaders in Silicon Valley understand that; they do not let their own kids use their products because they know how addictive and harmful they are.
