Channel 4 screened a documentary last night about pornography, its accessibility to children and its effects on the brain.

Former Loaded editor and occasional Sun columnist Martin Daubney presented Porn On The Brain and hopefully it shocked many parents in to taking more control over what their kids are exposed to.

He showed how easy it was to access truly shocking material for free using a computer.

And he described the phenomenon of school kids passing a smartphone with explicit material around the playground “as if it was Top Trumps”.

What he didn’t touch on was another tool that most children have, which gives them the same free and easy access to hardcore material and goes completely unmonitored by parents.

There’s one in 50 per cent of homes in the UK – usually located in kids’ bedrooms.

It is a games console.

I’ve got a Sony PlayStation 3 and I took the picture above within 45 seconds of switching it on. It’s that easy.

Parents may know that games consoles such as the PS3, XBox 360 and the Nintendo Wii connect to the internet to permit online gaming.

What they might not know is that they have in-built internet browsers which allow the user to access the net in exactly the same way as on a desktop computer.

So if mums and dads are doing a good job in policing what their children watch on the home PC using parental restrictions, their children could be accessing every type of porn imaginable without their knowledge from the comfort of their bedroom upstairs.

If you’re worried this could be happening in your household, you could fire up the PS3, access the browser and look at the history – if you know how.

But let’s face it, kids are far more advanced than their parents in all things technological these days. They will have wiped the browsing history leaving no trace of what they have looked at.

They could even be going through another, seemingly innocent site, which masks the web pages that the user looks at afterwards.

The Childrens’ Commissioner says UK children as young as ten are being exposed to hardcore videos.

And in the Channel 4 documentary, Professor Gail Dines explained the nature of the material.

She said when an 11 or 12-year-old boy puts “porn” in to Google, he might expect to see pictures of breasts and maybe a naked woman.

She said: “The reality is that he is catapulted in to a world of sexual violence, sexual cruelty and body-punishing sex.

“He has probably not had sex with another human being. This is his first introduction to sex.

“Pornography is sexually traumatising an entire generation of boys – introduced to sex via Gag Me And Fuck Me and Anally-ripped Whores.”

There are plenty of headlines in the Mail et al about young boys acting out what they have seen in explicit videos.

And Daubney interviewed a doctor who confirmed that sexual offending young boys were often obsessed with porn.

David Cameron wants internet service providers to improve their filters to protect the vulnerable.

But as Daubney showed, an “army the size of China” would be required to manually view all of the sites and give them appropriate classifications for a filter.

And the fully-automated systems are simply not effective.

I think right now would be a good time to say that I’m in no way anti-pornography.

As long as it’s legal and the performers are not being exploited, I think there is a place for it in society.

And I would defend anyone above the age of consent’s right to watch it – on their PC, phone, PS3 or whatever.

Unfortunately, the cost of this is the prevalence of it thanks to the internet.

The Top Trumps effect with smartphones is of course a concern.

But that is the modern-day equivalent of a Seventies kid taking in one of his dad’s porn mags in to the playground.

It’s almost impossible for parents to police but at least the children are watching it in limited quantities and not alone, in an aroused state.

Far more worrying in the Daubney doc was the revelation of how porn is promoted through Facebook.

A group of 13 to 15-year-olds at York High School described how animal porn would be showed on their Facebook page just because someone else in their Friends list had Liked it.

Daubney asked if their parents restricted what they looked at on the internet.

One said: “My parents trust me.”

Another added: “People find a way to watch it anyway.”

So if the cost of a free society is that our children will have easy access to porn, education has to be the thing that limits the damage it does.

The documentary showed sexual education workers going in to schools to talk about pornography and the difference between it and real sex. This is essential.

But parents have to take responsibility too. That means not accepting that kids are better at computers than they are. And not trusting them.

It means researching those websites that mask browsing histories and making sure they are not used on home computers.

And it means working out how to find the browsing history on a PlayStation and if there is nothing in it, being suspicious.

I’m going to send this post to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to see if they have any plans to protect kids using their consoles from internet porn. And whether they have any tips for parents.

For now though, here’s what I would suggest.

Go in to the PS3 or Xbox browser. If you don’t know how, learn! Google it or get someone to show you.

If the history is empty, visit a site you know your children never would (Royal Horticultural Society, B&Q, Marks & Spencer etc) and make a note of the date and time.

Log on a couple of weeks later and look again. If the browser is empty or your site’s day and time has moved, your child has deleted the history so must be accessing something they don’t want you to see.

Now you can talk to them about it and re-enforce that education.

In short, parents must acknowledge that hardcore material is out there and their kids will see it – probably from a very young age.

But they can do more to limit this exposure and also the damage it does to young minds.

Response from Sony, Oct 26:

PlayStation will always take its responsibility to our younger consumers extremely seriously, but there has to be a point where parents also have to bear some burden of responsibility for protecting their own children, especially when setting up the master account for access to our PlayStation Network (not least as this will be where they enter credit card details for online purchases etc.)

With regard to our web browsers we offer users the chance to disable it completely, require a password for each time its launched or else we work with Trend Micro, a respected global leader in internet content security provision who offer services precisely to protect kids from inappropriate sites and content on the internet (and also offer identity theft protection).

You can link to their service directly from our browser (press the triangle, and select Browser security on the left – then Trend Micro) to restrict access to inappropriate content.

There is of course a section in our user manual which comes with every PlayStation console that deals with this as well, as you’d expect.

Our forums provide another source for parents to help them understand what controls we offer – for example

http://uk.playstation.com/ps3/support/general/detail/linked233999/item391100/Parental-controls/

David Wilson

Head of PR, UK

