Taken from: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25910281-5013570,00.html


PSYCHOLOGIST Steve Biddulph reckons he has sniffed a change in parents' attitudes as they confront their concerns about the sexualisation of their children.

He has noticed mothers and fathers are less clueless about what's going on with their children and are becoming angrier.

What they're angry about, he and other experts said at a conference on the media's sexualisation of children in Melbourne last week, is the stripping away of their basic right to grow up at a pace that will allow them to enjoy their childhood and grow into well-balanced adults.

From the influence on girls and boys of the portrayal of women as sexual playthings on Sunday morning music videos, to easy access to pornography via the internet, to discussions of sex in magazines read by primary school children, to the marketing of suggestive clothing to girls as young as five, parents are starting to steam.

They might admit to some blame, busy working lives reducing their capacity to better monitor and control their children's influences and environment, but many are coming to the view that malign effects on children, particularly as a result of marketing and advertising, aren't receiving the attention they deserve at government level, Biddulph says.

"I think parents are growingly angry. They feel like the public space -- roadsides, shopping malls -- are places they don't want to take their children. There is also a feeling against television and a new willingness to turn it off," he says.

Biddulph, a family psychologist who lectures to about 10,000 parents a year, believes the sudden rise in the sexualisation of young girls, primarily as a vehicle to sell products worth billions of dollars a year, is the biggest issue facing modern childhood.

"There's a double jeopardy: a predatory marketing push using sex to get the attention of kids and using it for younger and younger kids to make them insecure and want more approval.

"And at the same time there is the disappearance of caring adults from the lives of teenagers. Especially that protective alliance of mothers, aunts, adult family friends, who 50 years ago would have spent hours a day talking and laughing and discussing life with girls.

"Now the peer group has become the default, and the media has become the third parent, sometime first parent, in terms of passing on ideas and values," Biddulph says.

Are things really so grim? Are the lives of children so different now than a generation ago? And if they are, does it mean they are necessarily worse? Or are these the concerns of a bunch of white-picket-fence wowsers who want to wrap their children in cotton wool?

Ann Sanson from the department of paediatrics at the University of Melbourne and network co-ordinator for the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth has no doubt about a link between children's health and development and their environment, including their consumption of media and lack of outdoor play.

"ARACY's report card on the health and wellbeing of Australian children last year found we rank well down the list of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. We do have high rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse and juvenile crime, and these indicators are lower in more child-friendly countries," Sanson says.

"We are also towards the bottom of the ladder in terms of mental health, teen fertility and school retention rates."

By child-friendly, Sanson is talking about the design of cities that allows for safe outdoor play, and family-friendly work policies and practices that promote family time. Without these in place, children tend to spend more time in front of screens.

"The countries that do the best, the Scandinavian countries, see the raising of children as a shared responsibility between family and the state. They have good family leave opportunities, they have children's ombudsmen and commissioners looking out for their rights," Sanson says.

As Biddulph notes, the issue causing greatest consternation among parents is the sexualisation of children before they are emotionally mature enough to cope. He worries about two age groups, those in their early teens having sex when they're not ready, and younger girls already developing concerns about their appearance and attractiveness to boys in early primary school.

"The maturity of children has grown in superficial ways -- looking, acting and speaking like adults. But the deeper signs are not good. An increase of 15 per cent of girls having sex while still in high school in just the past five years. A significant cohort beginning sex at just 14 or 15.

"And these kids are not reporting enjoyable or happy sex lives, but rather often conceding to pressure to keep approval, be cool, or win attention from boys."

Biddulph says these confused attitudes to sex are driven by the imagery children are exposed to in the media, girls looking sexually available in music videos, boys being able to access porn in a greater variety of ways, including telephones. And they are too smart to be denied by blocking technology.

Julie Gale, a Melbourne mother and founder of the Kids Free 2B Kids lobby group, agrees children are bombarded by ever more graphic sexually explicit material at every turn, much of it aimed directly at them. And it can be damaging, she says. Some studies link it to increased depression, anxiety, body disorders, lower age of sexual activity and an increase in the rate of sexually transmitted disease among teens.

"Young boys, nine, 10, 11, are constantly seeing objectified images of females in the public arena. They and their mates increasingly find their way to porn through all the new avenues available, and having their sexuality constructed by what they see," Gale says.

"Then as teenagers they expect girls to act out in ways they weren't not so long ago. They're not finding girlfriends cute unless they're doing those special tricks."

For the girls, she says, what is acceptable in the mainstream media robs them of the chance to discover their sexuality at the same time as their hormones demand it.

"Take Dolly magazine. It recently had a section "OMG my boyfriend wants me to ...", Gale says. "Among the things discussed were giving him head, a handjob and having a**l sex. But it wasn't about how to deal with it if the subject came up. It was how it was done.

"And remember this is Dolly. We know eight, nine, 10-year-olds read it, because by 13 they think they are way past that and more into reading Cosmopolitan and Cleo."

Body shape and attractiveness are issues worrying girls at an ever younger age, Gale and Biddulph argue, driven in no small part by advertisers looking to sell merchandise.

"Britney Spears, Bratz dolls, their influence on the way very young girls look is only the tip of the iceberg," Gale says.

"It's all-pervasive in these girls' lives. They sing along to Lily Allen's song about giving head and lying in wet patches at eight, nine, 10. It's played on afternoon radio and it's up to the radio stations whether they delete those lyrics or not. It shouldn't be the call of some station manager of a radio station to decide those things."

Which brings us to what can be done. First there are the parents.

"Not having TVs in children's or teens' bedrooms is probably the best single protection of their mental health," Biddulph says. "This has been found to drastically reduce TV viewing in total, not to mention exposure to imagery of either a violent or sexually inappropriate kind.

"But parental actions can only go so far. And the most vulnerable children will always be the ones who have inept or disempowered parents. Public and governmental action is essential," he says.

Already the Senate has cast its eye over the issue. Last year it held an inquiry into the sexualisation of children in the media. Rather than recommending additional regulation on advertising and media, it suggested a self-regulating approach, at least for the next 18 months. The Rudd government is overdue to respond to the Senate report.

"Self-regulation doesn't work," Biddulph says. "Corporations that do harm always propose self-regulation as a tactic for delaying or preventing legislation.

"There is clear evidence that sexual content harms children. We simply need a national body that proactively prohibits both advertising and products in the public space that sexualise children or harms them in other ways.

"It's not rocket science. Countries in Scandinavia do it. So does New Zealand."

Former Family Court chief justice and founding patron of Children's Rights International Alastair Nicholson agrees the state should be playing a much more active role in the protection of children.

"For a start, the government has a minister responsible for early childhood, and a minister responsible for youth, but no one is responsible for that middle area from when children are between five and 14," Nicholson says.

He believes there are attempts to discredit those who seek to highlight concerns about the sexualisation of children, but there is an easy test to run across any action taken in the public or private sphere: whether that action is harmful to children.

"People who express criticisms ... are often described as wowsers or killjoys. Other responses assert that regulation or restriction detracts from democratic principles such as freedom of speech.

"(But) this is about children, who are immature and often confused about their burgeoning sexuality. They have a right and need for nurture and protection, which we are markedly failing to give them," Nicholson says.

Changes can be made, he says, including given the Advertising Standards Board coercive powers and helping it act as a regulator rather than merely acting on complaints.

"(Also) an office of children's commissioner at a federal level should be set up, which could investigate issues involving abuse of children by media and others and report (them) to parliament," he says.

Perhaps the last, sobering words can be Biddulph's.

"The romantic, tentative and tender feelings of young people would surprise many adults. But these positive and loving qualities can be easily battered, bruised and driven underground if the culture does not reinforce them. There is no poetry left.

"For the boys, conditioned by online porn and compliant but disengaged girls, sex may come to have no more meaningful than an ice cream or a pizza.

"For millions of girls, sex has become a performance, anxiously overlaid with worry about how do I look? What sexual tricks does he expect or not expect? How do I compare with all the others he has slept with?

"Little wonder we have one of the most depressed, anxious and lonely generations of young people ever to inhabit the earth."