Thousands of British youngsters are being persuaded to broadcast sexually explicit videos from their own bedrooms as part of a worrying new trend, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Monitors who scour the internet to remove indecent images of children are identifying more than 100 new webcam videos a day, mostly featuring girls aged between 11 and 13.

So called 'self-generated' material now accounts for a third of indecent web pages being intercepted in the UK, with 22,000 separate videos removed from the internet already this year.

Many of the youngsters who film themselves performing sexually do so in the belief that the video will only be viewed by a boyfriend or a close circle of acquaintances, and film themselves in the comfort of their own bedroom.

But in reality the person on the other end of the web-camera is often a predatory paedophile, who has manipulated the victim into believing they are in a relationship with someone their own age.

In other cases, material that was meant to be kept private between a girlfriend and boyfriend, can be posted on the internet and then tracked down by paedophiles.

And experts have also found live streaming websites where youngsters film themselves performing explicit acts in order to win the approval of an online audience