Hardcore made easy

Got kids? Have they got laptops? You’d better read this. Last week I went out to dinner and my host casually mentioned, while topping up my glass, a website that he said was completely altering the economics of the net, just as music file-sharing sites are sinking the CD industry, free newspapers are making inroads into print circulations, piracy is harming the DVD industry and video killed the radio star.

I don’t particularly want to give you the name of the site (of course, I have led a sheltered life – you could well be a frequent visitor) but, basically, it’s like YouTube except it’s for hardcore porn: a portal offering free, unfettered access to all manner of tastes and niche interests, if you get my drift.

When we all rose from the table to inspect it, a sick feeling started in the pit of my belly. It wasn’t the awful titles of the videos that did for me – Thin Czech Girl Gets F*****! was one, as if this were cause for a national holiday; another was Justine Wants to Learn Anal. Nor was it the usual parade of male fantasies – you know, very young girls eager to engage in practices that are banned in several American states, all that kind of thing.

What felled me, as the parent of children aged 12, 14 and 15, was the heart-sinking evidence that it is now completely normal and common to post graphic videos online of yourself having sex, or to watch others doing whatever it is you want to see them doing – without the need for a credit card, a password or any proof of age. And the site I saw is the tip of the iceberg. In the top 100 sites in the UK – as determined by Alexa, the ranking engine – there are four similar porn “hubs”, one of them a Spanish site boasting it is a “portal gigante de videos de sexo”.

So it didn’t take long. And now it’s happened. The pornification of the internet is complete.

Okay, I allow that this kind of stuff is a matter of choice for over18s, and between consenting adults. What concerns me is that these are open-access sites, which children of all ages can view. (It’s thought that up to 90% of children have viewed pornography online, and the average age for a first-time view is 11.) So if you combine adolescent hormones and the teenage rage for exhibi-tionism (it’s a fact that nothing happens to a teenager until it’s up on their Face-Book or MySpace page) with the fact that boys are hardwired to take risks and thrill-seek, you have – in my view – the makings of a total disaster.

I have considered the (adult male) argument that it is instructive and healthy for under16s to view adult content, and that porn means nothing. I know that it’s important for the development of the frontal cortex to experiment when you’re young. I understand that, of course, most 15-year-old boys will look at porn if it’s out there (what else are they most likely to seek out? The website for the London Review of Books?). I’ve read Tanya Byron’s excellent report on internet safety, which led to the launch last week of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS), and spoken to several of the council members.

And – sorry, guys – I’m even more convinced: looking at hardcore porn is pernicious for the underaged and should be prevented if at all possible.

In America, the National Institutes of Health is studying the long-term effects of porn on young adults. And – surprise – it reports that porn messes up relationships and perverts attitudes to sex. Well, it would, if you were turned on in your formative years by images of women as sex objects gagging for extreme sex.

John Carr, a member of the Family Online Safety Institute, tells me that children frequently have to be taken into care after being exposed to pornography. He knows of a nine-year-old boy who started acting out porno scenarios in the playground. “His idea of sex was a foursome, with everyone switching partners every five minutes,” he told me.

There are several cases in the US of children who have been charged with pornography offences after sending their friends lurid images on their phones (which are now like mini-production studios, of course, with sound and colour and video) or posting content posed by minors on the web. I know. Whoah. When we were kids, if you wanted to see a friend, you got on your bike.

We can’t get away from it now, though. Children are natives of the digital age, and we’re the unwelcome immigrants. Technology and kids will always be one step ahead of parental controls, if not several miles – there’s no filtering software that can prevent, for example, the exchange of data packets on hand-held devices such as BlackBerrys and iPhones.

So, got kids? Have they got laptops? Then get some effective filtering software (though your teens could well be nifty at uninstalling it). Try to impose rules about screen time (no, me neither – it’s beyond a joke at my house). And hope and pray that when it comes to their own offspring, our techie internet kids will be a lot more more clued-up than we were.