Il giudice esprime preoccupazione per l’accesso a Internet senza supervisione dei bambini in un caso di abusi sessuali su minori

High Court Judge Criticizes Unsupervised Children’s Internet Access in Child Sex Abuse Case

A High Court judge, Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring, expressed grave concerns about children’s unfettered internet access while sentencing a now 16-year-old boy for the sexual abuse of his then six-year-old sister.

* The Crime: The boy, who was 13 at the time (June-Dec 2022), committed oral rape and produced/distributed 64 identifiable images of the child abuse (including the girl’s private parts and sexual activity) on Discord.
* Internet Access: The court heard the boy had unsupervised internet access from a very young age, starting to view pornography at age six or seven and later accessing it for 12 hours a day. He was given a tablet at age five.
* Family Background: The family was very isolated, living “off the grid” in an “unconventional home” without running water. The children were allegedly home-schooled, with no medical/dental supervision.
* Judge’s Stance: Justice Ring found the level of access “takes my breath away,” comparing it to not taking a box of matches from a seven year old. She called on the “tech world in general” and “lawmakers” to address the issue of unfettered access, stating there’s no “best interest argument” for it.
* Sentence: The judge imposed a four-and-a-half-year detention sentence, suspended in full for three years, on condition of strict supervision by the Probation Service.
* Mitigation: The boy’s young age (13 at the time) and his difficult home circumstances were mitigating factors.
* Victim: The victim and her siblings were immediately taken into care and are now doing well with a foster family. The girl (now 8) asked for a letter of apology from her brother.

The suffering of this young girl is beyond comprehension. The parents should never have access to these children again

The neglect in this case is extreme, but children accessing pornography from an early age is extremely common. There are multiple studies on children’s first exposure to pornography, and the newer the study, the younger the age.

And porn can radicalise people. It’s becoming more common for men to strangle their partners unprompted because they saw it in porn – every time I say this on the internet, I get a comment from a woman saying it happened to her.

People get addicted to porn, and they gradually seek out more extreme stuff. Many people who accessed child abuse material didn’t start out wanting to view that sort of imagery, they spiraled into viewing more and more extreme imagaery. ([Recent Guardian article on the topic](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/05/i-didnt-start-out-wanting-to-see-kids-are-porn-algorithms-feeding-a-generation-of-paedophiles-or-creating-one))

Some people disagree with all this and draw paralells between how metal music and video games were seen as corrupting kids in the past. But the difference with pornography is the dopamine hit from an orgasm. It is a reward. There can be a Pavlovian response to certain pornographic and abusive material

These parents neglected their children totally.

But what it shows, very clearly, is that unfettered internet access IS child neglect, and IS severely damaging. We need to make this so damn clear throughout society.

The Aussies have it right. I’d keep kids off the internet until they’re 16 except in supervised circumstances.