Children know that attitudes to sex are changing. Teachers know that the need to be ‘hot’ is damaging young girls mental health. We all know that our children are being sexualized, commercialized, and exploited for profit, and we all know who is to blame.
If we want to see what its likely to be in the future we need to look at what is happening in the USA and the UK. - It is not a pretty sight. Big business and the media are ruining young lives in so many ways - and the future looks incredibly bleak.
Throughout the world billions of dollars are being spent to get children to participate in unhealthy activities, eat junk food, indulge in mindless consumerism, and define themselves by their sexual attributes, exploits and attitudes.
Tesco, a UK supermarket chain that has a call centre in India and plans to open numerous stores here, are marketing a pole-dancing kit in their Toy section! Other supermarkets have been selling pink and black lace lingerie to little children, and clothes shops have been marketing T-shirts for young girls with the slogan "So many young boys, so little time" and padded bras with "Little Miss Naughty" written on them!
Schools are also being targeted. Junk food companies are giving book vouchers, and any number of schemes are being used to get schools involved in marketing junk products. This is particularly the case with school sports where the more harmful the product, the more likely the attempted connection.
There is some good news. Parents and Teachers are fighting back. In the UK new regulations are being introduced this week to ban advertising of junk food on all children's TV channels by January 2008. They will also be extended to cover children's programmes on other channels by January 2009. Not only this. Teachers Unions are demanding a ban on all junk food advertising at times when children are likely to be watching. It also wants the ban extended to cover "sponsorship, celebrity endorsement, mobile phone, internet, email and publications aimed at children".
In even more encouraging news, this week the leader of the opposition in the UK, David Cameron, condemned the "harmful and creepy" efforts to sell sexy clothes to young children and warned that if elected he would take action to stop it. The father of three also pledged to fight against all the sexualisation of children.
The problems of the sexualisation of young children is also on the agenda in the USA. A recent report of the American Psychological Association (APA) stated categorically that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls’ self-image and healthy development. It leads to a lack of confidence with their bodies, as well as depression and eating disorders. According to the APA, Magazines, television, video games and music videos all have a detrimental effect and they are confronting these industries in an effort to get them to stop.
There is overwhelming evidence that the media and the marketing agencies are creating a lifetime of mental stress and unhealthiness for children. Some childhoods are already destroyed. We as parents and teachers can only mitigate and protest the junk, sexualized, consuming, process. It is time for our government to act.
