UK leads the world in online porn at work

British
workers are more likely to download and send sexually explicit material while
at work than their counterparts in the rest of Europe,
the US
and Australia,
according to a survey.

The
study of 350 workers, for internet security company SurfControl by the School
of Psychology
at Queen’s University in Belfast,
also found that UK
staff were 30 per cent more
likely to forward sexual material to colleagues via business e-mail accounts.

More
than half (51 per cent) of UK
workers surveyed had been exposed to unsolicited pornographic material in the
workplace. But only 20 per cent of respondents indicated that they had made a
formal complaint.

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Martino
Corbelli, director of
marketing with SurfControl,
said that as the UK
moves towards an increasingly litigious culture, businesses needed to pay more
attention to the content that is allowed into and out of the IT networks.

Michael Millar