Police data shows that arrests of children for sexual offences rose by almost 20% in 2024–25, increasing from 3,225 to 3,809. At first glance, this might appear to be part of a broader rise in youth violence and social disorder. It isn’t, though. In fact, almost every other indicator is moving in the opposite direction.

Homicides among 16- to 24-year-olds have fallen to their lowest level in more than a decade, knife injuries among under-17s have declined, and violent offending by 10- to 17-year-olds is now 24% lower than it was a decade ago. Sexual offending, however, is bucking the trend. Over the same period, the number of children cautioned or convicted for indecent image offences increased by 42%.

So why has this trend emerged? This latest research, conducted by the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF), found that one teenager in every classroom had experienced physical or sexual abuse in a relationship. According to the researchers, abusive behaviour in adolescent relationships appears to be linked to exposure to sexually violent content on social media.

The researchers rightly note that some of the rise may reflect better reporting rather than more offending. Adolescents increasingly recognise coercive sexual behaviour as abuse and are more willing to report it. They also now know that sharing sexual images is a crime. I know from my clinical work as a psychotherapist that even five years ago, this was not so well known among adolescents. Yet even allowing for all that, the divergence remains striking.

It is tempting to conclude that the solution is simply better relationship education in schools. Though there is probably some truth in that, sex education fails to explain why sexual offending is rising while almost every other form of youth violence is declining. So what has changed?

One obvious answer is the extraordinary transformation in the sexual culture in which today’s adolescents are growing up. Today’s teenagers are the first generation to carry an unlimited supply of online pornography in their pockets from childhood. A quarter of 16- to 21-year-olds first encountered online pornography while still in primary school; by the age of 13, half had already been exposed to it. Yet the videos they are watching are nothing like 20th-century pornography. Mainstream porn today depicts aggression, domination, humiliation, coercion and strangulation as ordinary features of sex. Boys soon come to believe, through their porn consumption, that girls want sexual aggression. Girls, from the same source, believe that they should enjoy this aggression.

Among 18- to 21-year-olds, 79% reported having seen pornography involving sexual violence before they turned 18. Almost half also said that girls now expect sex to involve physical aggression, including acts such as airway restriction. I remember working with an adolescent girl and explaining to her that I would hate any sexual aggression from a boyfriend. She was astonished by this: she thought strangulation, suffocation and degradation were basic elements of adult sex.

As the norms governing adolescent relationships are shaped by online pornography and social media, it is time we addressed this issue head-on. Behaviours such as sexting, image sharing and online sexual coercion have created entirely new opportunities for exploitation and offending that scarcely existed a generation ago.

If we continue to treat rising child-on-child sexual abuse as simply another policing problem or another reason to expand sex education, society will miss the deeper problem. We need to confront the impact of our hyper-sexualised and pornified culture and ask whether it is any surprise that young people’s behaviour increasingly reflects it.

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Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist and bestselling author. She is Founder-Director of Genspect, an international organisation that advocates for a healthy approach to sex and gender.

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