I first saw porn at about 12 or 13 on social media; it came up on Instagram and boys at school would show it around and laugh,” says Jay, who preferred not to use her real name.
She added: “It’s now I’m older and I’m having sex that I am aware that I have a strong feeling of how sex should be performed and this makes me really sad.
Advocates for age assurance, a range of measures to check someone’s age before they access a website or app, say under-18s can access pornography too easily.
I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” the top-selling US singer said, adding that it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys”.
“I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she said, adding that she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive.
The 192-page report recommended that an updated bill requires all pornography sites to prevent children from accessing their content and called for the introduction of minimum standards for age assurance measures, from entering your date of birth on a pop-up form to more stringent age verification.
McGlynn said bringing all porn publishers into the scope of the bill would be a “very positive step forward” but legislation was only “one part” of a solution to the problem.
Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, a colleague of McGlynn at Durham University who has researched the impact of pornography on young women, said the ease with which adult sites could be seen, and their content shared among friends, was “frightening”.