Postfeminist Media Panics Over Girls’ ‘Sexualisation’: Implications for UK Sex and Relationship Guidance and Curriculum

Abstract

In their book Young Femininity: Girlhood Power and Social Change, Aapola, Harris and Gonick (2005) argue that Anglophone girlhood is continually represented in Western media through oppositional discourses of celebration vs. crisis (girls ‘in crisis’ and ‘creating crisis’) amidst media and pedagogical tropes of girls’ empowerment. One international (although Eurocentric) crisis that has risen in recent years in relation to girlhood has scrutinised girls’ ‘sexuality’ vis-à-vis the discursive framing of premature and thus age-inappropriate ‘sexualisation’ of girls (Renold and Ringrose, 2011). There have been high profile policy reports across Anglophone countries. In Australia, a widely cited report on ‘corporate paedophilia’ looked at the ‘adultification of children’ and ‘direct sexualisation’ of girls (Rush and La Nauze, 2006). In the USA, the American Psychological Association commissioned a report on the ‘sexualisation of girls’ (APA, 2007). Starting in 2009, in the UK, the Scottish Government commissioned a report on sexualised goods aimed at children (Buckingham, 2010) and the Home Office conducted a Review on the Sexualisation of Young People (Papadopoulos, 2010). These were followed up by a review of the reviews by the neo-liberal UK Coalition Government entitled Letting children be children (2011). Official government concern over child sexualisation has fed into, or followed on from, a veritable ood of popular books, television documentaries, news programmes and popular films on child sexualisation.¹