Moral panic – Cameron acts

One of the strangest documents ever released by a government department is the Bailey Review Letting Children be Children recently issued by the Department for Education. It covers the alleged “sexualisation” of children and is motivated by the paedophile hysteria. The title is misleading as it only concerns itself with girls; any references to boys are in the context of their attitude towards girls. It conflates two issues, the supposed sexualisation of girls with the impact that the sexual depiction of adult women has on the behaviour and appearance of girls. Neither boys nor adult men are assumed to possess any sexual appeal despite research showing that at least a third of all child molestation cases involve boys. It is worth noting that no definition of “sexualisation” is given in the report, and that there is likely to be a wide range of views on what this, if anything, actually constitutes in practice.

The report claims to be independent. In reality it is nothing of the kind. It has been commissioned to provide recommendations and conclusions which the government has already pre-agreed in advance, through meetings between departmental officials, children’s charities and other parties. This review has not, of course, come out of the blue, the Labour government commissioned a similar report and there has been the recent TV programme Stop Pimping Our Kids. In other words an agenda has been building up promoted by children’s charities with support from feminists, the Mumsnet brigade and some journalists. The objective is to fabricate child protection scares as a battering ram to control or curb male sexuality, outlook and attitudes that are now regarded as “inappropriate” by those behind this agenda.

The premise underpinning the report that we are living in an “increasingly sexualised and sexual culture” is completely bogus. There is no evidence that children today are more sexualised than the previous generations who now comprise most of today’s adults. If anything the reverse is true as a consequence of feminist pressure to control the depiction of women in advertising. This review also covers commercialisation affecting children, but again the panic is misplaced since advertising directed at children has never been as tightly regulated as it already is today.

The report also treats young girls in a monolithic way which defies common sense. What is clearly unsuitable for a seven year old may be perfectly normal for a teenager but the review makes no distinction between the two. The review is mysteriously concerned about a new phenomenon termed “gender-stereotyped clothing”. Do dresses and skirts fall into this category? Since these garments have been worn by girls and women since time immemorial, this bizarre phrase, and the thinking behind it, appears incomprehensible. The issue of “sexualised” images on the covers of magazines is also raised, but again there is no definition merely a suggestion that offending images should be covered by modesty sleeves. So called “adult” magazines are already subject to this requirement, a relatively recent innovation. We appear to be moving to a situation where any display of women’s bodies is forbidden.

The government is threatening to introduce legislation in eighteen months if satisfactory progress on a voluntary basis has not been made. It will be interesting to see how this legislation will be framed. One thing we can be sure of is that the paedophile hysteria has yet to run its course. So there will be still more repressive and paranoid measures to curb individual freedoms, using child protection as a pretext.