A new study has shed light on how an increasing number of girls in their early teens are resorting to sexting and sending explicit photographs to their boyfriends
Jon Brown, head of the NSPCC's sex abuse programme, has asserted that sexting is on the rise, and it's providing a whole new resource for perverts.
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"We have unearthed a lot of evidence of girls aged 12 and 13 becoming pressured into sending explicit photographs to boyfriends," the Mirror quoted him as saying.
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"There is no doubt that young boys are learning from each other and from the internet to abuse girls," Pat Craven of the Freedom Programme sexual abuse charity, said.
"I have heard of girls as young as 11 getting involved sexually with boys.
"What this leads to later in life can be very dangerous as boys objectify girls as sex objects, and girls are being told that is their function. Sadly, many end up believing it."
Craven said that she has heard a lot more about sexually controlling behaviour in schools.
"It is happening across the board, right across the country."
Children's lives are quite different to those their parents experienced at school. Raunchy pop videos and easily available pornography on phones are making children ever more sexually aware.
A study of 14 to 15-year-old girls revealed that four out of 10 did not find anything wrong in taking a topless photograph.
And one in six underage girls did not see anything inappropriate about posing fully naked for others.
Three out of 10 girls who receive a sexually explicit text or email admitted that they do not even know who the sender is.
Reportedly, teenage girls uploading indecent photos for their boyfriends, get into the hands of internet-trawling paedophiles.
Detectives monitoring online sex rings have discovered a surge in "self-taken" seized images in the past 18 months.
Thousands of hours of indecent footage taken on webcams by girls in the UK have ended up on paedophile websites, according to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency (Ceop).
There are many examples of young girls finding themselves in a seedy trap.
"We've come across cases of children having to leave their school or even their county because the images have spread so fast that they don't know who will have seen them," David Baggaley, head of education at Ceop, said.
"They feel pressured to perform sexual acts they would not want to do without being coerced," Brown said.
"This has a lot to do with influences children are under. To be a nude model is seen as an achievement for a girl, and to have sex with a footballer is something to aspire to," Craven said.
u00a0"The scale of this is surprising. I don't think parents are aware of the extent of this," Brown added.
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