Each year thousands of young people are found to be watching pornographic material of children, according to freedom of information (FoI) requests put to police forces across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Detective Tony Garner, the lead on an online child sexual exploitation team based in Worcester says the material discovered is “the most abhorrent”.

Of the police forces contacted, 21 responded with more than 6,000 children and teenagers identified. In some regions, young people make up more than half of all individuals found to be accessing illegal images.

Despite being one of the smallest police forces, officers in West Mercia – which covers Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire – have visited 436 under 18’s this year alone.

Senior officers have stressed that the majority of these visits were for safeguarding reasons, with a view to supporting the individuals, rather than criminalising them.

“I’ve been in policing 20 years and have been scratching my head the past couple of years about the harm we are seeing,” Garner said. “It’s scary. As a country, as a society, it feels completely out of control.”

Garner said children were becoming “desensitised” by early exposure to pornography, with an “increasing interest in shocking material after being exposed to violent pornography”. Without intervention, children are becoming addicted to very harmful material, he said.

“Let’s say you are a 12-year-old boy and you look online for sexual videos of girls your own age,” he said. “… But what they find is rape and abuse material. It’s horrific. Or we might find a 14-year-old boy who is uploading indecent images of himself, maybe he is being groomed or blackmailed.

“The erotic template is being formed by young people masturbating to increasingly extreme material … even paedophilic material.”

The Children’s Commissioner of England revealed in a recent report that of those surveyed more than two-thirds of young adults said they had seen violent pornography before the age of 18.

The same report also warned of the correlations between early exposure to pornography and the development of harmful attitudes to others.

Rachel Haynes, the senior practitioner of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation – a child protection charity – said, “The violent and degrading nature of what they see in porn confuses young people about what is appropriate.

“Our young people tend to come via police referrals. But this isn’t sexting they have been involved with. They are viewing indecent images of children that they don’t know.

“We hear a lot about bulk file downloads. Young people may be looking for sexual images of teens their own age, but with that will come images of much younger children being raped.”

Officers were keen to note – whilst the data is concerning – there is a notable rise in “self-generated” images i.e. teenagers are choosing to send sexual images to partners consensually.

However, such images can then be sent on with the original taker quickly losing control of the image.

The new Online Safety Act which includes the implementation of age-verification measures to protect children from pornography has now received Royal Assent.

The charity CARE has been calling for much tougher online safeguards for many years and recently had amendments – of which they have been involved in drafting – accepted by the Government, and are working hard to ensure their speedy implementation in order to protect children online.