Children and porn: Horrific court cases show why Ireland must bring in age verification now

In two recent Irish cases, boys who abused girls had been consuming porn from an early age. Gemma Kelly says we must curb children's access to porn that normalises violent non-consensual sex

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. Stock picture: Alamy

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.