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A mental health crisis in girls has been fuelled by them being driven down the ‘dark spiral of online life’ during lockdown, the Children’s Commissioner warned last night.
The largest ever survey of children found girls were twice as likely to face mental health problems than boys and 40 per cent of girls aged 16 and 17 were unhappy with their mental health.
Dame Rachel de Souza said she was concerned that much of this was because of the ‘normalisation’ of sexual behaviour caused by the easy access to adult material online.
She warned of a sexting surge during lockdown, with boys feeling under pressure to ask girls for naked photographs. The Children’s Commissioner for England was speaking as she unveiled the results of her ‘Big Ask’ survey, which received responses from 550,000 children in April and May.
A mental health crisis in girls has been fuelled by them being driven down the ‘dark spiral of online life’ during lockdown, the Children’s Commissioner warned last night (stock image)
And she said children had told her how they had been led down the ‘dark spiral of online life’ during lockdown when they were unable to go out and play.
Dame Rachel urged adult websites to introduce age verification as soon as possible, and called on social media firms to do more to prevent underage children using their sites.
The survey found that 71 per cent of children aged nine to 17 were happy with their life overall, although 9 per cent did not think they would have a better life than their parents.
Girls were nearly twice as likely as boys to be unhappy with their mental health – 25 per cent to 13 per cent. Older children were also more likely to be unhappy (32 per cent of 16 to 17-year-olds, compared with 9 per cent of nine to 11-year-olds).
Some 40 per cent
