Are marketeers simply giving young girls what they want or are they exploiting a child's need to fit in? asks SHEILA WAYMAN.
BRAS FOR seven year olds. Children’s stationery adorned with the Playboy motif. Perfume promoted with collectable dolls. Tracksuits for adolescents with ‘Juicy’ embroidered across the seat of the pants.
Individually these may seem relatively harmless consumer goods but they are small pieces in a bigger and worrying picture of incessant, sexualised marketing aimed at pre and early teens.
The British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is so concerned about the issue that she recently ordered a fact-finding review into the “sexualisation” of girls through clothes, videos and music lyrics and a possible link with sexual abuse and violence.
While some parents may see high-street chain stores selling Playboy T-shirts for 11-year-old girls as a “bit of fun”, she said, many other parents were concerned that their daughters were under pressure to appear sexually available at an increasingly younger age.
Launching the three-month study last month, Smith said she was concerned about clothes that were inappropriate for young girls, images on computer games and videos, and attitudes that were sometimes represented through music.
“It is time that manufacturers saw the writing on the wall over this and stopped producing these sort of things for young girls,” the home secretary was quoted as saying.
Sexualisation of girls can mean a number of different things, points out the director of the Children’s Research Centre in Trinity College Dublin, Prof Sheila Greene. “It can be actual behaviour of people towards girls, which is on the borderline of child sexual abuse; it can be in relation to commercial aspects, the kind of clothes they wear and the kind of videos and entertainment they are exposed to; and you can look at it in the terms of psychological processes that are going on in the girl’s head in relation to seeing herself as a sexual object from an early age.”
While these different aspects have varying consequences, she says, there is no doubt that there has been a fundamental shift in 21st century society.
“Little girls have always played at being grown-up women and dressed up, but usually it was mummy’s high heels. They played at being a grown-up lady or a big girl going out with her boyfriend, but it was playing at it, it wasn’t actually absorbing it as part of who I am.
“It’s gone from a let’s pretend thing, ‘we’re ladies going out to a dance’, to ‘I am a sexy little creature’ – and that, I think, is a dangerous slippage. I think it has crossed that line from pretend to ‘this is me’.”
A taskforce set up by the American Psychological Association (APA) warned in 2007 that girls’ exposure to sexual imagery from an early age could have a devastating effect on mental and physical health.
Low self-esteem, poor academic performance, depression and eating disorders were among the possible ongoing effects identified by the research. The APA report also suggested that early sexualisation may contribute to the incidence of paedophilia.
A year earlier, the Australia Institute pulled no punches with a report entitled Corporate paedophilia: sexualisation of children in Australia. It highlighted the increasing use in advertising of children who appear aged 12 years and under, particularly girls, dressed, posed and made up in the same way as sexy adult models.
In Ireland, the marketeers are having a free run, says Dr Kevin Lalor of DIT’s School of Social Sciences and Law, because the church, a voice which we would have looked to in the past to criticise this type of behaviour, has lost much of its moral authority. For instance, there are many countries around the world where you are not faced with a whole load of explicit magazines at children’s eye level when you walk into shops, the way you are in Ireland, he points out.
As well as the sexualised clothes for pre-teens and toys, such as Bratz dolls, Greene sees a similar trend in TV programmes and films aimed at children – characters such as Hannah Montana, a teenager with a double life as a rock star, in a Disney Channel sitcom. When Hannah Montana The Movieopens in Ireland on May 1st, we can expect a stampede of girls aged six upwards to the cinemas to see their heroine on the big screen.
“I think she is quite sexualised,” says Greene. “I looked at it for research purposes and she does do quite a lot of sexy kind of moves.”
Last year Miley Cyrus, who plays the title role, outraged some parents with a photo shoot for Vanity Fairwith photographer Annie Leibovitz that included a provocative, bare-back pose, in which her chest was draped with a sheet. Cyrus, then aged 15, said afterwards she was embarrassed by the picture and apologised to her fans, although the magazine maintained her minders had been on set and were happy with everything at the time.
The ASA research found that when little girls are treated like sexual objects they think of themselves as that. Greene explains: “They behave sexually and then they start to get preoccupied with do I look sexy and am I conforming to the sexy model that looks like Hannah Montana? And if I don’t look like that, then I’m inadequate.”
It is very dangerous because it narrows their view of what being female is about, warns Green. In their minds, success then hinges on their image and their femininity.
“A lot of them will fail. They are not going to look like Cheryl Cole, therefore they feel bad about themselves and this is how it affects their self-esteem.”
It can also put them in a dangerous kind of relationship with boys or men, and it affects how their brothers see them.
“Boys too start to have this very narrow view of what girls are about.”
However, the effects should not be over-stated as a lot of children will shrug it off, stresses Greene. “There are some kids who are more vulnerable to it than others and some parents who collude with it more than others.”
She would like to see parents becoming more aware about the issue. “You can resist it and I think there are a lot of good reasons why people should think about resisting it more than they do.”
If parents want to develop their children’s full potential as individuals, she adds, “then they don’t want them to be commercialised little cloned versions of what some big toy company or clothing company wants them to be.”
For teenage friends who wear similar clothes, all dye their hair blonde, use fake tan and apply similar make-up, it is all about fitting in.
“If you talk to adolescent girls, they’ll deny the clone look,” says educational psychologist Nicky O’Leary. “Put them in a room and they look like mirror images of each other but in their minds they are saying ‘we’re all individual, we’re all unique’. What they are doing is creating a ‘them and us’ scenario: this is us and God forbid that a mother or a teacher would wear something trendy.”
O’Leary stresses that media has both positive and negative influences. Children learn to use critical thinking, she points out, and it is the ones who don’t who are in trouble.
No matter what their age or gender, children need to understand that advertising is not real life. “We all need to teach our kids to differentiate.”
Parents have more influence than the media on children, says Paula McKenzie, co-founder of Parents Place, which runs parenting courses. “Parents are the primary educators and need to educate themselves.”
If parents are uncomfortable talking about sex-related issues with their child, she says, the child will sense that and be less likely to raise such matters in the future.
A common response by a parent who finds a child watching a television programme with sexual imagery that is not age appropriate is to turn it off immediately, saying “you’re not to watch that stuff”. End of conversation.
“That’s a missed opportunity to explore with the child their understanding of what they’ve seen,” she suggests. It is really important to give a child a sense of safety in discussing these issues.
The main concern about the "grooming" effect of sexualised marketing and entertainment for children is the decreasing age at which teenagers start sexual activity, says Lalor, who is co-author of Young People in Contemporary Ireland(Gill and Macmillan). "The acts are commencing before the emotional psychological maturity is in place and therefore their ability to make judgments as to what is appropriate, what is safe, is impaired because of their youth."
A survey published by the Crisis Pregnancy Agency and the Department of Health in 2006 found that the median age for first sex had decreased by four years for men and five years for women over the past five decades. Most people now in their 20s will have had their first experience of intercourse before they were 18, it reported.
However, Lalor argues that the media does tend to exaggerate teenage misbehaviour, such as underage sex. “The vast majority of Irish children are happy; they’re well balanced; they do respect their parents. They do take the lead from their parents about important moral issues like religion and sex behaviour, etc.”
Peers become increasingly important throughout the teenage years, and are the primary source of values for matters such as taste, music, fashion.
“For the more fundamental issues, such as moral values, traditions, cultures, spirituality, their parents, and adults generally, remain an important source of advice and value,” he adds.
The policy and communications director of the Rape Crisis Network Ireland, Clíona Saidléar, was taken aback when she saw a brand of perfume with collectable dolls being promoted in a Galway pharmacy with sexually provocative material. She asked the manager who the perfume was being marketed at and he described it as the “perfect Communion present”.
She questions what sort of message this is giving a seven-year-old girl. “Are we telling seven year olds that they are not pretty or of value unless they are perfumed with artificial products?”
When children get to teenage years, what works for perpetrators of sexual abuse is a blurring of their age and their sexual availability, she points out. “As a society and adults, we must make sure that the whole responsibility for drawing boundaries on sexual availability is not entirely on children.”
However, she stresses the importance of adults' perceptions. "When the 10 year old gets dressed up like the Pussy Cat Dolls, do we look at her and say she's asking for it? No, she's dressing up, she's performing and that doesn't make her sexually available."
Equally, just because teenage girls are dressed and behaving in a seemingly provocative manner, it does not mean they are looking for sexual activity.
“There is a responsibility on us not to perpetuate and support the notion that just because a girl is performing in a certain way means that they are inviting or consenting to sexual activity because, by and large for a child, it doesn’t,” she adds. “They are playing with the power their sexual performance has, they’re testing that.”