A leading forensic psychologist has questioned how private a teenager's bedroom should be when it comes to going online.
Dr Kevin Lambe has warned that Irish children as young as 12 have viewed extreme child pornography on the dark web.
He said the material being watched was getting more extreme, as Europol reported a sharp global increase in viewing of child sexual exploitation material.
The dark web refers to content on the internet that is intentionally hidden and requires special software to access.
Dr Lambe told Newstalk Breakfast children often use the bedroom as a refuge.
"The problem is children taking to their bedrooms and not experiencing the full impact of positive parenting within the family home and children needing to find a place of refuge away from parental disharmony or addictions and neglect and then them developing their own depressions and psychological symptoms," he said.
"The problem really begins in the home, where children find a place of refuge in the bedroom, and they go on to the chat websites where they seek some sort of affirmation - something other than the neglect they're experiencing at home."
Finding the dark web
In many cases, Dr Lambe said, children befriend people on regular chat sites and are then told how to get into the dark web.
"What's happening on these chat sites where they're befriending older men, or older teenagers, is that they're being taken through a tutorial on how to get into the dark web; how to download the various software, to prevent the IP address from being identified to enhance their privacy and then the various layers of the onion in which to seek out the different types of images," he said.
"Accessing the dark web is something for children that takes place after a long - many months or even longer - of a relationship being built up with the people with whom they're chatting to online."
How private should a bedroom be?
Dr Lambe said parents should be keeping an eye on what their children are doing online.
"I don't know if the conversations about the dark web need to be taking place between parents and children," he said.
"I think really what parents need to be concerned about is that they're 100% sure what's going on in the privacy of the child's bedroom - and indeed how private should a child's bedroom really be for a child up to age 12 and even older?
A person browsing on a computer. Picture by: John Williams / Alamy Stock Photo"The use of technology in the bedroom needs to be monitored by the parents, and they're the types of conversations that need to take place with children long before any type of problem, such as an interest in going on chat websites and further, develops."
He said issues around trust should be addressed as early as possible.
"In my experience, I find that the parents that are having open conversations with their children from a very early stage - all around building a trusting relationship and being involved in the tasks of what we would call good parenting - that that the issues around trust with regard to the phone, and with regard to visiting websites, does not become a major issue then when adolescence comes," he added.
