New technology to be blamed for schoolkids' porn addiction

Schoolchildren as young as 11 are spending up to 10 hours a day watching explicit adult material as new technology sneaks pornography into their pockets, experts have warned.

Experts have also cautioned of an increase in porn addiction in children as a new generation wired to smartphones and laptops have 24-hour access to hardcore material.

Australian addiction specialist Robert Mittiga said the explosion in mobile technology had led to a surge in numbers of children dealing with porn addiction.

Preliminary findings of new Australian research indicates that 43% of regular pornography users were first introduced to explicit images between the age of 11 and 13.

Mittiga said some porn merchants were targeting kids by making pornography featuring cartoon and children’s book characters.

He said he had personally treated children as young as 14 for porn addiction and some young addicts spent up to 10 hours a day viewing explicit material.

Parents are installing hidden spyware on their children’s phones to secretly track their movements, read their text messages and look through their photos.

Online networking giant Facebook has become a teenage battleground, fraught with dangers such as crime, bullying and the exposure of secret details.

Google has hit back at calls for laws to prevent children from viewing internet pornography, claiming parents were to blame if their children saw explicit material on the web.

“It’s so accessible, that's the problem, and we don’t have enough security or barriers,” the Courier Mail quoted him as saying.

Mittiga said children were now watching pornography at school and sharing files with other students.

He said children were 10 times more likely to get hooked on explicit material than adults, and their addiction could escalate into criminal acts.

He said some of his young patients had stolen credit cards to fuel their addiction and racked up bills of up to 9000-dollar on pornography sites and phone sex lines.