If you're too ashamed to speak to children about sex, exploitative free porn will fill the gaps

It seems doubtless to me that the staggering rise in reported sex assaults in primary and secondary schools – more than 5,500 alleged sex assaults, on boys as well as girls, in three years – goes hand-in-hand with the unfettered availability of extremely hardcore pornography to minors. Not a tattered copy of Fiesta found behind a Portakabin, as many of us remember as the height of 1970s childhood excitement, with its pages of exposed nipples, spread legs and the occasional flaccid penis lolling about in the One For the Ladies section. Or its Readers’ Letters section, featuring tales of sex-mad secretaries and office cleaners. How quaint and vanilla, in the era of the free internet hardcore porn clip aggregator, this all seems now. Yesteryear’s exposure to porn featured no actual scenes of sexual intercourse. No erections, no mention of anal sex, no group sex and nobody being forced or fooled into anything.