1 OPTING INTO (AND OUT OF) CHILDHOOD Young people, sex and the media David Buckingham and Sara Bragg Published in Jens Qvortrup (ed.) Studies in Modern Childhood: Society, Agency and Culture London: Sage Introduction Children today are growing up much too soon, or so we are frequently told. They are being deprived of their childhood. Their essential innocence has been lost. Indeed, some would say that childhood itself is effectively being destroyed. For many people, perhaps the most troubling aspect of this phenomenon is to do with sex. Young people seem to be maturing physically – and showing an interest in sex - at an ever-earlier age. Even quite young children appear to adults to be alarmingly knowledgeable about the intimate details of sexual behaviour. Children, it is argued, are being prematurely 'sexualised'. Much of the blame for this supposed loosening of sexual boundaries and the subsequent ‘loss’ of children’s innocence has been placed on the media, and on consumer culture more broadly. These arguments are traditional territory for right-wing moralists. It is perhaps not surprising to find a conservative newspaper like Britain’s Daily Mail fulminating about the media's 'sick conspiracy to destroy childhood', as ten-year-olds are apparently 'bombarded on all sides by pre-teen make-up, clinging clothes and magazines encouraging them to be Lolitas' (24.7.02). Likewise, its columnist Peter Hitchens (2002: 49) paints a picture of a culture saturated and depraved by uncontrollable sexuality, most of it derived from the media: It is very hard to be innocent in modern Britain. Advertising on television, on posters and on the radio, is drenched in sexual innuendo. Television programmes rely almost entirely on sex and violence to raise their drooping audience figures. The playgrounds of primary schools echo with sexual taunts and jibes. Rock music, which is now almost compulsory in the lives of even the youngest, is full of sexual expression and desire. Yet this image of childhood innocence debauched by media and consumer culture also appeals to more liberal commentators. Thus, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of the Independent (18.3.02) laments her 'innocent' daughter's impending corruption at the hands of a 'sordid popular culture'. 'Powerful, immoral people', she argues, will 'manipulate her desires and appetites', pressurising her to transform herself into a 'sex machine'. According to Alibhai-Brown, … the next campaign for British feminists needs to [be] directed at those advertisers, broadcasters, celebrity pedlars, newspapers, magazines, pop stars and others who have made this carnal hell for our young ones, and who still insist that this is nothing at all to do with them. Even liberationists like the gay activist Peter Tatchell, who argue for the importance of 'honesty' about sexual matters and advocate 'sexual rights' for young people, tend to dismiss the 'half-baked and sensationalist' information which they perceive in the media (2002: 70). From this perspective, ‘good parenting’ necessarily entails regulating and restricting children’s access to the media – and not doing so is tantamount to child abuse. Within the terms of this debate, therefore, children are effectively seen as lacking any independent agency whatsoever: they are merely innocent victims of the media’s evil attempts at manipulation. Yet the recurrent claim that children are being 'sexualised' at the hands of the media obviously implies that they were not sexual in the past, and have now become so. Likewise, the view that children's relation to sexuality is being 'commodified' or 'commercialised' also seems to presume that there was an earlier time in which childhood was somehow free from commercial influences. As ever, we are encouraged to look back to a Golden Age of innocence, well before the