The Sunday Times is organising a symposium on the dangers to children of online pornography.

The aims of the event, which will take place at the Policy Exchange in London tomorrow, are to raise awareness of the issues surrounding online pornography and provide a forum for a range of experts to discuss the growing crisis caused by its easy access for children.

Keynote speakers include:

Gail Dines - author of Pornland and Professor of Sociology at Wheelock College, Boston will be talking about why the UK needs a public health campaign to educate people about the dangers to their children of online pornography.

John Woods - consultant psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic in London will give a new paper entitled: ‘Child abuse on a massive scale: the effect of unfettered pornography on our children.’ John is the author of Boys Who Have Abused: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Victim / Perpetrators of Sexual Abuse.

The symposium will also feature a number of youth workers working on the frontline with teenagers and struggling with the problems caused by online pornography.

The event will be concluded by a panel discussion chaired by Sunday Times associate editor Eleanor Mills, with Claire Perry MP; Gail Dines; John Woods; Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group and Diane Abbott MP.

Eleanor Mills says: "In a matter of clicks on any computer the kind of sexually degrading images that a generation ago would only have been available in specialist shops in Soho are readily accessible by all. As a society, we regulate adult content in cinemas with 18 certificates and on TV by having a 9pm watershed, but on the internet we do nothing. The result is Generation XXX who are getting their sex education from hardcore porn and growing up with their sexual template set by the extreme material they watch. The resulting behaviours - including sexting, increased incidence of rough/violent sex, degrading views of women and porn addiction in teenage boys - are far from what most parents want for their children.

“This is not about prudery or censorship but child protection and public health. We cannot and must not look away while this eats away at our society and relationships. The point of the symposium is to raise awareness of the subject and give the professionals dealing with these problems on the front line a forum in which to tell the wider world what is happening."