To support the campaign run by mumsnet we have chosen to list their campaign outline here.

Let Girls Be Girls: latest press

• ‘We are hypersexualising girls, telling them that their desirability relies on being desired…’ Dr Linda Papadopoulos, The Guardian, 25 February 2010
• From one worried mother, a passionate call to arms: it’s time to stop the fashion industry dressing girls of ten like this Daily Mail, 11 February 2010

Any thoughts on how we can maximise the impact of this campaign? Please add your support, comments, ideas or extra research to this campaign thread.

Let Girls be Girls

High-heeled shoes for babies, sexual slogans on girls’ underwear and clothing, pole-dancing kits for tweens – these are some of the products manufacturers have tried to sell in UK supermarkets and high street chains in the past few years.

And your responses to this creeping (and creepy) sexualisation of children in products and marketing have been along the lines of:

“Ghastly, vile and just plain wrong! Why can’t children be allowed to be children FFS.” Servalan

“I walked into WH Smiths today to buy five-year-old daughter a new pencil case and next to the Hello Kitty and Forever Friends range was the Playboy range – according to the store manager aimed at 14 yr olds! Normally a ‘live and let live’ type of person, but I was totally incensed at this as my daughter thought the bunny logo was cute! Is it me or is the sexualisation of kids getting earlier and earlier? JC03

“Little girls are being groomed into passively accepting their place as objects in our increasingly pornified culture, and it stinks.” TenaciousG

So we think a Mumsnet campaign might be in order, along the lines of Let Girls be Girls. Its aim is to encourage retailers to sign up to a simple pledge that commits them to selling only products which do not sexualise children.

The Mumsnet campaign offers retailers and manufacturers a positive course of action – to take the lead in ending the premature sexualisation of children through their products and marketing.

It’s hardly news that the worlds of entertainment and celebrity encourage girls to believe their sexual attractiveness is paramount. But, increasingly, this same trend is visible in products marketed at young children. A growing number of toys, clothes and accessories encourage them to enter the world of adult sexuality.

There are plenty of reasons to be worried by this trend:

• It introduces children to an adult world of sexuality, when elsewhere we are rightly encouraging them to resist the pressure to become sexually active at a young age
• It tells girls that the most important quality they need is ’sexiness’ and that female sexuality is all about pleasing others
• It encourages a culture in which children are viewed as sexually available
• Authorities as varied as the NSPCC, the NUT, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Deirdre Sanders from The Sun have all weighed in on this issue, calling for a halt to the premature sexualisation trend

So we’re asking retailers to back our campaign and to let parents know they don’t and won’t sell products which sexualise children.

Any thoughts on how we can maximise the impact of this campaign? Please add your support, comments, ideas or extra research to this campaign thread.

We’re not attempting to lay down the law about which products are or aren’t OK. After all, what one person views as harmless fun, another might think horribly inappropriate (a bit like Mumsnet Talk). But we reckon that, pre-puberty, children should not be presented as sexual or encouraged to believe that attracting the opposite sex is something they need to consider.

Effects of premature sexualisation on girls

There’s been no research into the impact of premature sexualisation on very young girls that we’ve heard of (if you have, please let us know), but there have been two recent studies into the effect on older girls, both of which make pretty depressing reading.

• In 2007, a study by the American Psychological Association found that: “Sexualisation has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, and healthy sexual development.”
• A 2008 study by Girlguiding UK and the Mental Health Foundation found that premature sexualisation and pressure to grow up too quickly are two “key influences” in the anxiety felt by girls.

The Mental Health Foundation said: ”Girls and young women are being forced to grow up at an unnatural pace in a society that we, as adults, have created and it’s damaging their emotional well-being. We are creating a generation under stress.”

If there’s any other research you know of which might be relevant, do drop us a line at campaigns@mumsnet.com or add it to the campaigns thread.

All of which begs the question: if it’s all so blooming awful, why do parents buy this stuff? Possible explanations include pester power from children who are themselves under huge peer pressure, the might of marketing departments and (like everyone else) parents are susceptible to the general tide of pop culture, which seems, over the last decade, to have been moving in an ever more explicit direction in terms of the role models it presents to girls and young women

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