It seems that teenage girls in the UK are starting to take a chaperone with them when they go to meet with their boyfriends in order to help protect them against having to have sex.

Our response to this is probably – good and about time!

But it isn’t that the teenage girls don’t want sex – it’s that the sex that their boyfriends expect is too influenced by pornography, with them wanting to act out what they are seeing in explicit material they find on the internet.

As an article published last month in The Daily Mail explains:

Today’s chaperone is called, in teenspeak, a ‘third wheel’. And she is not being forced on girls by concerned or controlling adults worried about honour and etiquette.

The third wheel (the verb is ‘to third wheel’) has been re-invented by the girls themselves because they want protection from the sexual demands of their boyfriends.

When I spoke to many teenage girls in researching the subject, they told me these demands are both ‘disturbing and upsetting’, and they are certain they’re being fuelled by what their boyfriends are watching online: hard-core, explicit porn.

This deeply worrying trend is finally starting to be noticed by those in authority.

Psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos has just published a government report into the sexualisation of children, and is certain that exposure to porn is having an adverse affect on the lives of today’s teenagers. 

‘My research has left me extremely concerned,’ she says. ‘A recent survey showed that 54 per cent of boys found porn “really inspiring” in terms of sexual performance. This worries me, because of the nature of the material they are now watching.

‘This isn’t the type of pornography that was around when we were teenagers. What kids are seeing today is very often violent, and it has no intimacy, no respect, no kindness, no context of sex within a loving relationship.

‘It is very damaging to young people and to their relationships.’