IN that boring way adults do, I asked an 11-year-old girl how school was going.

“Good,” she said, before telling me a boy in her class took a photo of an anatomy part he might have better kept hidden before sending it to his girlfriend. The indiscreet young lady sent it round her pals and before they knew it, it was on the internet.

For an attempt at small talk, the result was a lot to unpick: sexting, underage sex, social media perils, consent. “Cripes,” was my pathetic reply.

Altogether now: they grow up so fast. They grow up so fast and what should we do about it?

Well, Jeremy Hunt suggested to the Commons health committee on suicide prevention efforts that under-18s should be prevented by social media companies from texting sexually explicit images.

Given that young people may marry and lawfully have sex at 16, it’s baffling as to how the health secretary has alighted on the age of 18 as being the age of internet majority.

But that’s a mere bagatelle.

“I think social media companies need to step up to the plate,” he said. “And show us how they can be the solution to the issue of mental ill health amongst teenagers, and not the cause of the problem.”

Mr Hunt’s naivety is sweet but the idea that social media companies could press a magic button and end underage sexting shows a woeful level of ignorance. Image recognition technology, if this is what he’s thinking of, exists but it is expensive and inaccurate, hence bloopers such as breast feeding images being blocked on Facebook. Or what if two 17-year-olds wanted to share the historic “Napalm Girl” image for a Higher history project on Hiroshima?

Mr Hunt also suggests using “word pattern recognition”. Again, no cigar. Young people invent all sorts of euphemisms and new phrases for phallic symbols and sexy funtimes; it would be an impossible task to keep up. Would he ban the use of the aubergine emoji? Or, indeed, the cigar?

You can’t tar an entire adult populace with one Tory brush, but I can’t imagine Mr Hunt is alone in his ignorance of technology and how it works, nor how it is used.

Tell me how many of these form familiar parts of your lexicon: dog-piling, doxxing, baiting and flaming? They are, respectively: encouraging social media users to harass an individual; publishing personal details such as home address; humiliating a person by calling them promiscuous; subjecting someone to online abuse.

Mr Hunt’s other stumbling block is this, social media companies as “the cause of the problem.”

It isn’t social media companies that are dog-piling and doxxing - it’s the people who use them. Firms such as Facebook and Twitter absolutely have responsibility when it comes to cyber-bullying and should be involved in any attempts to address the issue.

Mr Hunt’s solution, however, does nothing to communicate responsibility and trust to the young people upon whose mental health sexting is having a negative effect.

A colleague was recently light-heartedly complaining that his house is “a graveyard for discarded Apple devices”. He walks into the living room and his children have an iPod in their ears, an iPad in one hand, an iPhone in the other hand and an e-reader on their laps. They need the e-reader, apparently, because the iPad’s “too heavy” to carry on the bus.

They need the iPad for keeping their Instagram accounts up to date. “What does a primary-aged child post on Instagram?” I asked, full of barren naivety. “Pictures of themselves going like this [mimics V-signs that would have made Churchill blush] to their pals.”

Well, doesn’t that sound like a worthy use of £300 worth of kit.

You’re shouted down if you try to argue against this, the forced necessity for children to have mobile devices. “Everyone has them”. “They need them”. “They’re useful”.

Whether you agree it’s necessary for a primary four to have a £400 mobile phone on a £30-a-month contract or whether you don’t, it’s allowing them access to a world they receive little to no advice in how to navigate.

Even if we could simply have social media networks shut down access to sexual material shared between young people, we shouldn’t. This week has also seen porn blockers proposed by the Digital Economy Bill and sweeping powers granted by the Investigatory Powers Act. Infrastructure capable of filtering and censoring the internet is something to be cautious about.

But more than that: young people live their lives - including the sexual lives their parents might want to pretend they don’t have - online. We want them to be, as we do in real life, competent and careful decision makers. Jeremy Hunt’s response is the political equal to “Cripes.” A paternalistic approach that restricts access is not the right way forward.

Educating ourselves and children and having open dialogue - at school and at home - about the internet and its difficult, adult side is.