Norfolk Police Chief Constable Simon Bailey says some young men have begun to ‘get their kicks’ from child abuse imagery after becoming ‘desensitised’ to legal pornography (Picture: PA)

British men aged between 18 and 26 are emerging as a ‘new group’ of online paedophiles after being brought up on a ‘staple diet’ of porn, a senior police officer has warned.

Norfolk Police Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the national police lead for child protection, revealed the UK is the third biggest consumer of online child sexual abuse in an interview with the Internet Watch Foundation.

Some young men have begun to ‘get their kicks’ from child abuse imagery after becoming ‘desensitised’ to legal pornography, he said.

The chief constable told the IWF: ’What we are seeing is a new group of young men aged between 18 and 26 who have been brought up on a staple diet of going to visit Pornhub and sites like that.


Mr Bailey is the national police lead for child protection (Picture: PA)

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‘They get to the point where there’s no pornographic material that is stimulating them so then they start to explore what child abuse imagery might look like.

‘They start getting their kicks from that.’

Mr Bailey added that he feared the problem will worsen as technology advances across the world, during an appearance on the IWF’s podcast Pixels From A Crime Scene.

He said: ’You look at the opportunities that will be afforded by people who are living in poverty to then exploit children to generate income’

Despite believing the UK police’s response to child pornography was ‘the best in the world bar none’, the top cop added that not enough was being done to tackle the issue.

The UK is the third biggest consumer of online child sexual abuse (Picture: PA)

Five hundred offenders are arrested and 700 children are safeguarded every month – but the number of referrals and the scale and level of depravity ‘just keep growing’, he said.

The police constable continued: ‘We have got to start being very honest about this, we have got to start debating this more in public.

‘We’ve got to start coming to terms with the fact that there are some appalling things taking place online that unfortunately the internet is probably the route of most of the evils.

‘We have to start looking at that and we have to start genuinely asking the question, how much more are we going to tolerate?’

It comes as the National Crime Agency (NCA) warns that at least 300,000 people in the UK pose a sexual threat to children as paedophiles look to exploit the coronavirus lockdown.

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