Viewing of pornography among 14 year old boys is almost universal, unpublished research by Britian’s children’s watchdog suggests.

The research by the Children’s Commissioner into access to pornography found that every boy and half the girls in a year group of 14-year-olds in one school had watched pornography, The Daily Telegraph reports.

The deputy children’s Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, has warned that the scale of access to pornography among children is now very  widespread.

She said: “We came across one study where they were looking at the whole cohort of year nine pupils within a large local authority in England.

“The findings were that 100 per cent – that is every single year nine boy – 14 year olds – is accessing pornography. And about 50 per cent of the girls. The girls did not want to look at the porn – they were being made to by the boys.”

The Commission had found evidence that children as young as 11 had been found actively to be “seeking out pornography”, she said.  

Some boys now felt they had an “absolute entitlement to have sex with girls, any time, any place, any where, with whomsoever they wished”.

The watchdog was so concerned that it had commissioned more research to see if boys actually understood what “giving consent” to sex actually meant.

She said: “We have commissioned research into young people’s understanding of consent… It raises very serious questions about whether boys in particular have any understanding of the concept of consent.”

Miss Berelowitz added: “No one should be panicking – but why should not there be a moral panic?

“Because what we are uncovering is that the scale of what this is doing to children and young people’s sense of what is reasonable.

“If that does not generate some huge moral anxiety amongst us as a responsible population, government and communuity then quite frankly I would be very worried.”

The findings emerged on BBC Radio Four’s Bringing Up Britain, which is examining “parenting and pornography”.

Last month, it was reported that children as young as five are being reported to the police over sex offences.

Children’s charity the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children blamed the figures on increased access to online pornography.

According to figures obtained by the charity, over 5,000 formal investigations have been launched over the past three years into under-18s accused of crimes including rape and sexual assault.

The NSPCC’s findings reveal that the number of sex offences allegedly committed by under-18s has gone up 38 percent from 1,432 in 2009/10 to 1,978 in 2011/12.

It means that every day police are dealing with at least five children accused of sex offences.  

She added: “We are very scared to do that as parents we shouldn’t be – it is a public health problem, I think in a way.”

Miss Perry said she wanted to see “better filtering” of sites by internet service providers, which could not be circumvented by tech-savvy children. She said that it was up to parents to take back control of the internet, in the same way that children are not allowed to drive a car until they grow up.

She added: “This sense that we have ceded the digital space to our children is really interesting because if your children said ‘actually mum I want to go and drive the car’ or ‘I would just like to eat crisps and chocolate for every meal’, we would feel we had some level of responsibility or some ability to control those decisions.”