Denying childhood: Exploitation and the body image of six-year olds

When a mother goes on Good Morning America purporting to administer Botoxinjections to her daughter, the public’s response is to demand the intervention of social services. The mother’s response is to assert it was all a publicity stunt – to get herself and her daughter nation- or even world-wide coverage on popular television.

Should the public take a backseat and social services withdraw in recognition that the episode was a mother and daughter bonding exercise? Or that for them, ‘Good Morning America was ‘fun’?

Fashion week organisers are becoming more mindful of the negative effects of the search for slimmer and slimmer (or skinnier and skinnier) models, younger and younger bodies on the catwalk. Advertisers may be more alert to this as an issue, too.

If the fashion industry recognises there is a problem - why not beauty contest organisers? If there is a furor within an industry where the very youngest mannequins used have been 14-years-old or perhaps twelve, how can there be no concern where six-year-olds are being influenced to believe that the body is all – and it must be slender, primped, preened and ‘perfected’, even if achieved by ‘natural’ means?

When demonstrators gathered peacefully to protest the holding of the beauty contest in Melbourne, the mother of the featured child – both of whom had travelled from the U.S. to appear in the show – withdrew because she ‘feared for her child’s safety’.

In the light of ‘Maggie Goes on a Diet’, surely our fear should be not only for the health and safety of children who may be encouraged to embark on a lifetime of dieting and the dangers this embodies. Nor should it be limited to concerns as to the emphasis on body size and shape leading to eating disorders that can result in death. We should fear for the loss of childhood of all children who live in a world where body image dictates the way they see themselves, their relationship to the world, and their very identity.