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COMPUTER games depicting brutal and sadistic behaviour, and the ease with which children can obtain them, are to be the subject of a crackdown by the European Union.

A new Sony PlayStation game, which shows a young girl being kidnapped and tortured, led to Franco Frattini, the Justice Commissioner, calling yesterday for urgent action to limit the availability of “obscene” material to young people. He has summoned a meeting of EU Home Affairs ministers next month because of his revulsion after watching Rule of Rose.

The game is to be released in Britain on November 24, but is available to order on the internet. It has already sparked an outcry on the Continent: the Mayor of Rome has called for it to be banned.

The game puts the player in the shoes of a teenage girl who is repeatedly beaten and humiliated as she tries to break out of an orphanage. She is bound, gagged, doused with liquids, buried alive and thrown into the “Filth Room”.

It was given a 16-plus rating by the independent Pan European Game Information body (PEGI), but Mr Frattini suggested that voluntary ratings were no longer enough to stop obscene games falling into younger hands.

“An increasing number of such games display and even glorify violence, sometimes extreme violence,” he said. He singled out Rule of Rose about “a young girl who is submitted to psychological and physical violence. This has shocked me profoundly for its obscene cruelty and brutality.”

Mr Frattini hopes that industry representatives will come forward with their own proposals to clean up games aimed at children and find a better way to restrict their distribution to older teenagers.

He added: “It is first and foremost the responsibility of the parents to protect children from such games, but I nevertheless think that we at member state and European level also have to take responsibility to protect children’s rights.These types of games are dreadful examples for our children.”

Sony did not release Rule of Rose in the US for fears of an outcry, particularly over alleged overtones of lesbianism and sadomasochism, but its distribution was taken up by a small independent company. Similarly, the game will be distributed in Britain by an Italian company which has not secured a rating from the British Board of Film Classification.

A BBFC spokeswoman said: “It may not come to us. It’s up to the distributor. If this game is not deemed by the distributor to be gross, they can give it a 16-plus [PEGI] rating.”

The EU home affairs ministers’ meeting on December 5 will first look at how to increase awareness of the potential risks of violent computer games with tougher labelling and restrictions on sales to young people.

Mr Frattini is suggesting a follow-up conference early next year to consider a voluntary code of conduct on the production of interactive games for children.

His spokesman later added that the PEGI rating was “not sufficient because anybody can buy them. In practical terms, it is not like when you go to a movie and they don’t sell you a ticket.”

A spokeswoman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said last night that Britain, with jail or fines for supplying 18-rated games to minors, “has got strict measures which we think go far enough at present”.

BIG MONEY

PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the US leisure software market will grow by 50 per cent by 2008 to $15 billion (£7.8 billion)