ROME, June 26, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Retailers in Britain have admitted that they have “gone too far” and are cooperating with a program that allows parents to register complaints about the hyper-sexualization of children directly to a business association, Anna Kuchta, an organizer at the European Union told LifeSiteNews.com today. Awareness is growing of its connection to the growth of the multi-billion-Euro human trafficking and child pornography industries.
Earlier this month, a European Parliament group led by Polish MEP Joanna Skrzydlewska held hearings on the problem of the sexualization of children. Skrzydlewska said the problem is “nothing more than imposing the sexuality of adults on young children, teenagers and especially girls when they are not ready for it emotionally, mentally or physically. From a very young age, girls are treated as sexual objects, their development is not respected, and the lines between childhood and adulthood are blurred. Children, especially girls are the targets of marketing specialists who sell them age inappropriate products so they will become lifetime customers.”
Skrzydlewska, whose doctoral dissertation was on the subject, says that many young women now believe that “the only confidence worth having is sexual confidence” and in fact, “it seems that what this hyper-sexualized society is selling to girls is actually a caricature of sexual confidence”. Hyper-sexualized images and messages are having a profound impact, researchers have found, with girls becoming more concerned with how others perceive them than with their own interests and desires. “By all aspects of sexualisation we are stealing childhood from children by pushing them to become ‘little adults,’ and by making them experience emotions that are difficult to deal with at their young age.” Children do not possess the ability to interpret them correctly and critically and the result is poor self-esteem, depression and even dangerous eating disorders, she said.
Pornography shapes young people’s sexual knowledge but does so by portraying sex in unrealistic ways, she adds. Moreover, pornography “is increasingly dominated by themes of aggression, power and control, blurring the lines between consent, pleasure and violence.” When girls are dressed to resemble adult women, people may associate adult motives and even a sense of adult responsibility onto the child. Depicting young girls dressed or made up as sexually mature older women may serve to normalize abusive practices such as child sexual abuse or sexual exploitation.
The EU report, not yet available in English, says that pornography has led the way to more men looking at children as objects of sexual desire, “especially after they clicked on the pop-up ads for teen porn” which lead eventually into real child porn. “For some men, the teen sites were just a stepping stone to the real thing, as they moved seamlessly from adult women to children,” the report says.
Porn and child porn industries and human trafficking are both growing businesses. Together pornography, human trafficking and prostitution contribute to a network of exploitation that fuels the global sex trade, Kuchta said. According to the UN, global profits from the trafficking of human beings currently stand at around $7 billion, equal to the global trade in drugs. The porn industry has created a market for children, which is being supplied by human trafficking.
Sex, Lies, and Christian Women: A Treatise on Sexuality
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- EU adopts plan to end human trafficking (jurist.org)
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