Stop this sex assault on our kids (From The Northern Echo)

Stop this sex assault on our kids

11:17am Tuesday 2nd March 2010 in

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THERE is a fast-selling line in padded bras for 11-year-olds, which no doubt the nine-year-olds will borrow or steal from their elder sisters. At the same time, a popular life ambition among many pre-teen girls is to be a Wag.

Then, David Cameron has stopped his children listening to Lily Allen lyrics, which is just as well as one of the most quoted of these among youngsters begins “F*** you, f*** you very much”.

Thousands of little girls tune in to missbimbo.

com – which describes itself as “a place where bimbos from around the world can join one another and be proud and happy in Bimboland”. Through the use of online avatars, youngsters can pretend to undergo cosmetic surgery and extreme dieting to make themselves into “the most famous bimbo in the world”. Meanwhile, 60 per cent of children between 12 and 15 say they have looked at pornography on the internet.

A concerned organisation called Parents’ Television Council monitored the pop channel MTV for 71 hours and found 1,548 sexual scenes and 3,056 examples of nudity.

Even at what you might regard as a more innocent and fairly harmless level – Nickelodeon shows watched mainly by preteens, such as I Carly, The Sleepover Club and H2O Just Add Water – the obsession is with physical appearance and dating.

In the shadow of all this brainwashing, it was good to see the Home Office issuing a report deploring the sexualisation of children.

I just wish all the various governments and agencies would sing from the same hymn sheet on this urgent matter. But what’s this?

The NHS in Sheffield has produced a booklet for use with teenagers called Pleasure which tells teenagers they have a “right” to an enjoyable sex life and instructs them that regular sex is as good for their health as five portions of fruit and veg each day.

The authors do not, unfortunately, go on to say that, if youngsters have a “right” to good sex, who exactly has the “duty” to provide it.

Steve Slack, director for the Centre for HIV and Sexual Health in Sheffield, publishers of this booklet, says: “It is designed to speak to young people to ensure they are emotionally ready for sexual relationships, to help build their self-esteem.”

That, however implausible it may sound, might well be Sheffield NHS’s intention – but it will not be its result. The Pleasure booklet is just another blatant example of sexual advertising aimed at young people. It is, like the amoral subversion which passes for sex education in our schools, just one more item in the sordid sexualisation of our children.

Never so much sex education and, at the same time, never so many unwanted pregnancies.

Why? Well, advertising works.

I don’t think there’s much a free society can do to restrict the commercialisation of sex, but there is certainly plenty that government agencies can do about it. Don’t join in the sexualisation process for a start.

I’m not for going back to telling children that babies are brought by the stork or to answer the restless awakenings of puberty by talking of the birds and the bees.

But in the interests of preserving young children’s natural childhood, let the people in public authority – government departments, teachers and health workers – restrain their lust to expose youngsters to their own so-called “adult” fixations before time.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange