It’s a month since the latest cohort of 11-year-old boys started secondary school. And what an education it will have been. Not in geography, chemistry or music – more biology (human) and history (search history, that is).

I say this with a heavy heart, but wherever two or more (or, indeed, fewer) were gathered together, they will have viewed pornography. On phones. On tablets. On laptops, in high definition.

Not just adventures in anatomy. Not prompted by age-appropriate curiosity about bodies and what to do with them (albeit many years’ hence). I’m talking about nasty, brutish, misogynstic porn. Violence and degradation that is far more the stuff of horror movies than the well-thumbed magazines peddled round the back of the bikesheds back in the day.

This week, parents like me were horribly, shamefully betrayed by this government, which has just announced its plans for a “porn block” to stop children viewing adult material online have been dropped. And I feel beyond angry.

The long-delayed measure would have required all adult internet users wanting to watch legal pornography to prove they were over 18 by providing some form of identification. It was first promised in 2015, and due to come into effect last year – but, after delaying tactics, it “will not be commencing” now. Why?

Among other sundry loopholes, privacy campaigners have bleated that the gathering of data would make it possible to connect an individual’s browsing habits to their identity, which could then be leaked.

And so our government, in all its pusillanimity, has decreed that grown-up embarrassment over their mucky internet history is more important than safeguarding the mental health of kids who find themselves easily accessing porn so nasty, it made me feel nauseous.

If you are of a squeamish disposition, look away. If you are a parent don’t. You need to know what is out there. You need to feel rage, and to channel that rage.