Children and porn: Horrific court cases show why Ireland must bring in age verification now
The boys in the two cases before Irish courts before Christmas consumed pornography from an early age — in one case, as young as six years old.
In just one week before Christmas, we saw two horrific cases come before our courts.
In one, a boy aged 13 had brutally sexually abused his six-year-old sister and uploaded images of the abuse online. In the second, a teenage boy was detained for the multiple rapes of his then 13-year-old “girlfriend” when he was just 14.
In both cases, the boys had access to online pornography from an early age. In both cases, this was cited as a factor in the abuse.
While these cases are shocking and distressing, they are not surprising.
Violent and misogynistic pornography is grooming our children, and it has been for decades. Children in this country have non-stop access to some of the most violent and hardcore pornography that has ever existed.
A 2021 analysis of the videos recommended to first-time users on the three most popular pornography sites in the Britain found that one in eight video titles contain sexual violence. The most common form of sexual violence featured was sexual activity between family members (incest), while the second most common category was physical aggression and sexual assault.
These videos were recommended to first-time users of pornography — and first-time users, of course, include children.
In 2023, France’s High Council for Equality between Women and Men found that “90% of pornographic content online features verbal, physical, and sexual violence towards women”.
Women are the targets of physical and verbal aggression in 94% of scenes in pornographic content. Usually, the aggressors are men.
During these scenes of sexual violence, 95% of the time the women in the videos either respond positively or with indifference — giving the impression that women either enjoy sexual violence or, at the very least, they do not mind it. In pornography, consent is non-existent.
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This is the content that children stumble across online. This is the content they are watching and internalising.
This is the content that shapes their sexual scripts and teaches them that violence during sex is normal — that violence and sex are one and the same.
As Cormac O’Keeffe reported here on Monday, this trend has now extended into AI. Children are being encouraged by gamified apps to create “AI girlfriends” using pictures of real people.
The boys in the two Irish court cases mentioned above consumed pornography from an early age — in one case, as young as six years old.
But these cases are not an anomaly, they are just the ones that make it before our court system and into the headlines.
In Ireland, it is reported that the average age a child first sees pornography is between 10 and 13 years old. Sexually violent offences perpetrated by those under 18 have increased more than six-fold since Irish adolescents gained access to the internet via smartphones.
Between 2010 and 2023, a total of 4,289 cases of sexual offences were referred to the garda youth diversion programme.
In July 2025, outgoing garda commissioner Drew Harris stated that extreme online pornography is “corrupting” young men into inflicting serious sexual violence on women.
He went on to say that, in serious sexual assault cases, it must be explained to young men what it is they did wrong.
This is consistent with what we see in other countries too — pornography has normalised sexualised violence so much that young men and boys do not even know when they have committed sexual assault.
Girls and young women are reporting that they are being strangled during sexual encounters and that they feel under pressure to agree to being “choked” by their sexual partners. At the same time, boys feel like they must be dominant and violent.
As the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute states in its Facing Reality study, pornography is responsible for grooming boys to perpetrate sexual violence and girls to submit to it.
The increase in child-on-child sexual abuse is fast becoming a child protection emergency that cannot be ignored.
The pornography industry is targeting and grooming our children.
The UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls found that adolescent boys were being taught by pornography that inflicting violence on girls and degrading them is “normal and part of sexual relations”. This is not an accident.
The British Board of Film Classification found that children aged six to 12 are disproportionately exposed to pornography sites hosting content featuring cartoons likely to appeal to children, including sexually-explicit depictions of superheroes and Disney characters.
Social media sites are awash with pornographic and highly sexualised content.
Research has found that that children who play violent video games are more likely than non-gaming peers to encounter online pornography and to develop the “pathological use” of pornography. Few, if any, online spaces that children encounter in their daily lives are free from pornography.
In the cases above, two young victims have experienced some of the worst abuse imaginable and their abusers will have to live with what they have done for the rest of their days.
While pornography consumption will not have been the only contributing factor in these horrific crimes, it is a known driver of sexual violence against women and girls, and we are seeing it play out in the lives of our children.
We have given the pornography industry free rein over our children’s sexual development and, if we do not act now, the cases that shocked us in recent weeks will become the norm.
In Britain, age verification for pornography was introduced under the Online Safety Act 2023. It came into force in July last year.
According to the regulator Ofcom, it has resulted in a decrease in traffic to mainstream pornography websites.
It is working — children are being protected from violent pornography.
Because of this law, in Northern Ireland, a child can no longer simply pick up a phone and access pornography.
Most mainstream pornography sites are age gated, meaning anyone under 18 must go through various steps to prove they are 18.
If they cannot, they cannot access the site.
In the Republic, just across the border, children have no such protection. Children are free to access hardcore pornographic content with the click of a button. This cannot continue.
We need robust age verification now. Just as children cannot walk into a shop and buy cigarettes or alcohol, they should not be able to access sexually violent content online.
We must regulate online pornography and hold to account the industry behind it that profits from sexual violence; the industry that profits from stealing our children’s childhoods.
- If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please click here for a list of support services.
- Gemma Kelly is a policy expert with the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute. As the former head of policy at the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation in the UK, she was deeply involved in advocacy to ensure that age verification for pornography was included in the Online Safety Act 2023.
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