The Bailey Review, ‘Letting Children be Children – Report of an Independent Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood‘ was published today. The link there is to the downloadable review and its appendices, in PDF format. First, I must acknowledge my debt to Dr. Petra, whose post neatly summarises many of my concerns and highlights issues with the report.
The foreword (by Reg Bailey) says, “We live in a society that is changing at what is, for many, a bewildering rate.” The review is supposed to explore whether this change is damaging children’s childhood and altering detrimentally the experience of growing up. Judging whether the societal changes that so bewilder adults are similarly confusing for children is extremely difficult, and I recognise that the review has a very tough brief in this respect.
My primary fear before reading the report was that it would merely peddle moral panic, instead of analysing the data properly. There appears to be an element of moral panic in the data, with concerns of parents about, for example, the watershed in large font, while the stats show that only 9% of parents want the time of the watershed moved (pp. 28-9).
Page 42 of the report specifically mentions “bras (padded or not)” as a symptom of this increased sexualisation, along with a list of female clothing such as high heels, short skirts and bikinis, rolling this into the misguided concept that these types of clothing will somehow encourage paedophilia. This links further into victim-blaming in cases of rape and sexual assault. One questions whether this is about protecting young girls, or about perpetuating the fear of female sexuality and ownership thereof. After all, the report doesn’t mention the growing sexualisation of teenage boys in celebrity culture. Is imposing ‘moral standards’ on young girls actually in the interest of promoting the virgin/whore dichotomy of female sexuality, where a woman is either completely chaste or a ‘slut’. Seeing sexually unavailable young girls in ‘sexual’ clothing interferes with the narrative that women are either prudish and covered up or gagging for it, baring their flesh. Furthermore, the existence of bras for children is nothing new, as this advertisement from 1959 shows.
Page 43 of the report:
The parents who contributed to the Review clearly wanted their own children to have the space and time to grow and develop mentally, physically and emotionally as individuals, learning how to navigate the world at their own pace and in their own unique way. We found a commonly-held view among respondents that sexualisation accelerates that process in a way that parents do not like, and that some parents worry could be harmful.
How on earth can children be expected to “grow and develop as individuals”, when they interact with other children daily and form their expectations of what is acceptable and expected of them via this medium. From a young age, the influence of one’s peers is as important or more important than the influence of parents. That parents feel uncomfortable about this isn’t surprising, but I argue this is a fear we should not pander to if the price is isolating and imposing morality on children from afar. The emergence of teenagers in the 60s and 70s was protrayed as tearing apart the fabric of society, while now we all accept teenagers’ role as prominent consumers and ‘early-adopters’ of societal change.
Throughout the report, I got the sense that concerns were being overplayed, with consistent use of large font to display parents’ concerns, with related stats showing these were minority views given less prominence. Given that the report was written the chairman of Christian group Mothers’ Union, this doesn’t surprise me at all. The almost total focus on young girls as victims of sexualisation is another major flaw of the report. It reads as yet another brick in the wall of this Conservative-led government’s determination to shield young women from their own sexuality ‘for their own good’ – a charge led by Nadine Dorries and her bonkers cohort from the Conservative Christian Fellowship.
[...] mentions the Bailey Review, which I’ve analysed here before (including reference to its anti-feminist, socially conservative standpoint), and so I won’t [...]