Perhaps most insidious of all is the way a predator works to separate a child victim from his/her parents and other gatekeepers, leaving them isolated and vulnerable. Again, corporations use this same technique. So even though increasing numbers of parents complain about the sexy tops and skirts, padded bras and sexy underwear available to young kids, still the corporations rule. Sexualised marketing is now so prevalent among manufacturers of teen products most of us scarcely give it a thought. What would have been inconceivable a decade ago has very quickly become an integral part of teenagers’ lives. As noted media critic Professor Mark Crispin Miller puts it, “The official advertising worldview is that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable, nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor” (Miller, PBS, undated).
When a girl or boy grows up in a toxic sexual atmosphere, their inhibitions are lowered to the point that accessing porn seems a natural progression. The sexualised climate our children are growing up in is a manufactured process, not an organic one. The sexualised landscape children are now forced to inhabit reshapes their attitudes to sex and their desires, and it starts long before they learn to read or write. During my research for What’s Happening to Our Girls? and the subsequent presentation of this material to thousands of parents, so many voiced their concern at the sexualised behaviour and language they are seeing in children aged 3 and up. Jacki, a health professional and mother of a 5-year-old boy, spoke with concern at her son talking of ‘sexing’ girls, when referring to girls he liked, after day care (Hamilton, 2008/2009, p. 19). Gemma, also a mum and kindergarten teacher, talked of the level of sexualised behaviour she was seeing, to the point that she and other teachers were having to be extra vigilant around the toilets and out-of-the-way parts of the pre-school grounds (Hamilton, 2008/2009, p. 19). Another grandmother was worried to find her young granddaughter accessing porn sites on her computer when she stayed over. It transpired that the little girl had been told about these sites by a friend at school (Hamilton, 2008/2009, p. 52).
Whether intentional or not, the sexualised marketing to children is negatively impacting their lives, attuning them to pornographic themes and behaviour. Alongside relatively innocuous online games, such as Club Penguin, young boys can now access the Play Games Club, for example, which in amongst action games offers boys such raunchy games as Hot Gllrs, where the screen explodes with large-breasted young girls. There’s Naughty Classroom and Naughty Office where points are awarded for a variety of moves including players viewing women’s panties and breasts. There’s also the Funny Red Carpet game where boys have to join various objects together. Their reward? To systematically strip the girls of their clothes. These games encourage boys to be voyeuristic, to have denigrating attitudes towards girls and women. And having sampled this kind of material, young boys could be forgiven for assuming porn is the ‘natural’ next step.
One of the many concerns around this active sexualising of small children is their desire to re-enact the scenarios they’ve been exposed to on their peers, creating a new level of child abuse. Add to this the plethora of sexualised images on billboards and in ads, and MTV clips and it’s not hard to see how their attitudes are being shaped in unhealthy ways as they are actively encouraged to take part in predatory and/or risky behaviour. This early sexualisation of little boys is nothing short of abusive. It collapses vital parts of their humanity and erodes their ability to connect meaningfully with others. As professor of nursing, Ann Burgess from the University of Pennsylvania, reminds us that the formation of sexual identity is a gradual process that develops through the childhood and adolescent years. Left to their childhood, boys and girls generally do not have a natural sexual sense until they are between 10 and 12 years old. Previously, most children came to understand the sexual landscape and their own emerging sexuality in age-appropriate stages, which are now hastened and distorted by the sexualised climate our children are immersed in. According to Burgess, this leaves boys and girls “confused, changed, and damaged” (Burgess, 1997).
Rowan, a youth worker, told me: “We are now seeing children grooming younger kids for sex, there’s a real seduction pattern going on” (in Hamilton, 2010, p. 64).
We’re now seeing kids sexually active way under 10, because of access to porn or their parents’ own behaviour. I’ve seen many cases where porn is readily left around the home, where it’s part of the family culture. Then you’ve got parents who carefully stash their porn away, and kids have a way of finding it (in Hamilton, 2010 p. 68).
These incidents are happening in homes across the socio-economic spectrum.
As boys grow, so does the desensitisation. The challenge for boys in the popular Grand Theft Auto is to progress as far as they can in the world of organised crime. To win, boys have to commit a range of crimes from killing cops to getting involved in prostitution. In the Microsoft and console versions of the San Andreas game there’s a sex mini-game, the ‘hot coffee mod’, where players can have sex with their online girlfriend. In the fantasy and science fiction online games MUDs (multiple user dungeon virtual games), and MMORPGs (massively multiple player online role-playing games) such as Rune Scape, there are opportunities for any boy able to find his way around this game to take part in virtual sex or cybering. Here, their avatars (online personas) can simulate sex with other consenting avatars. Those in the know can also highjack someone else’s avatars and use them in violent or sexual ways (Hamilton, 2010, p. 162). While some games have an MA15+ classification, there is nothing to prevent younger children in Australia purchasing and playing these games as long as they have a parent’s consent.
In virtual worlds such as Second Life, there are thousands of sex workers willing to perform virtual sex for ‘Lindens’ (Second Life currency) or for real money. Other sites have been set up purely to offer virtual sex (Ruberg, 2007). On YouTube there are several highly lucrative porn equivalents. Here millions of viewers can watch endless video clips of live sex. Some videos are professional, many homemade. While some content is free, others charge people to view every sexual act imaginable. Children and teenagers are accessing virtual sex sites, viewing live sex via web cams and chat roulette, amateur porn through such sites as redtube (one of a number of YouTube porn sites), and sharing sexual images on mobile phones and through email.
A Canadian study of 13 to 14-year-old boys in urban and rural areas revealed that more than a third of these boys viewed pornographic movies and DVDs ‘too many times to count’. Just over 7 out of 10 of these boys accessed pornography on the Net. More than half saw it on a specialty TV channel. In this same study 2 out of 10 boys viewed porn at the home of a friend (Betkowski, 2007).