Pupils 'damaged by hardcore porn'

Many pupils are regularly exposed to hardcore pornography, with damaging consequences, teachers have warned.

A new poll reveals teachers' concerns about access to explicit images and the negative effect it can have on youngsters.

A third (36.7%) of the more than 500 teachers surveyed for the Times Educational Supplement (TES) survey said they believe that the majority of their pupils regularly see hardcore pornography.

And three in four (74.6%) say that easy access to hardcore pornography is having damaging consequences on pupils in their school.

One teacher told the survey that children as young as 11 were becoming over-sexualised, adding "they feel under lots of pressure to perform sexual acts."

Others said that pupils were using derogatory sexual language and that watching porn had led to "awful" behaviour of boys towards young women.

Some told the poll that girls as young as 11 were dressing like "inflatable plastic dolls" and described pupils who "couldn't get to sleep without watching porn", the TES reported.

The poll found that the majority of teachers (67.3%) do not think that sex education has kept up with technological advances.

And there were also concerns about pupils becoming obsessed with body image.

More than half (55.8%) of those questioned said they had come across a pupil who wanted to surgically change their image.

There were reports of girls whose schoolwork was being affected by an obsession with make-up and tanning, and boys who were using protein shakes in the hope of getting a perfect body.

Lisa Handy, co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum told the TES: "If pupils don't have access to good-quality sex education, they go to other sources to get answers to their questions."

She added: "If they access things that aren't designed to educate, it won't give them realistic information about what a healthy relationship looks like."

PA