It’s Time to STOP Sexualizing Children

Children are our future, and as such, they should be protected and nourished. Recently there has been an influx of questionable, if not extremely abominable, incidents occurring with children. Thankfully many of these incidents have not gone unnoticed. Pop stars, movie stars, and the general public are speaking out. 

Blake Lively, star of Gossip Girls, is one popular figure who spoke up about the harm being inflicted upon children by a hyper-sexualized society. ‘Stranger Things’ star Natalia Dyer recently called out the over-sexualization of her younger co-stars, and there were many protests against Netflix showing, ‘Cuties,’ a show where the children are overly sexualized. 

‘Cuties’ is a French movie portraying 11-year-old Amy’s journey to “discover her femininity.” In the film, Amy “discovers her femininity” by rebelling against her mother and joining a stripper-like dancing club. She joins this group of underage children and learns how to “twerk” with them, leaving her conservative mother and family behind. This is what the secular culture believes “femininity” means, and what’s worse is that they are using children to advertise this twisted worldview.

Families and communities stood up to Netflix when they saw what the trailer for this show looked like. In response to the outrage, Netflix released a tweet saying, “We’re deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Mignonnes/Cuties. It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which won an award at Sundance. We’ve now updated the pictures and description.” Nonetheless, with these updates, the girls are still dressed like strippers and the dancing is still extremely preposterous for young girls, especially those who are very underage. 

People are starting to #boycottnetflix and encourage their friends to join them in doing so.  Society is recognizing that this apparent sexualizing of children is going way too far: their children need to be guarded, protected, and loved, not portrayed as sex-objects on television. 

Recently, ‘Stranger Things’ star Natalie Dyer spoke up about the sexualization of her co-stars. She says, “I generally feel like, to me, it’s over-sexualizing them,” in an interview with the Independent, “I feel protective over the younger kids, even though they’re not kids anymore; they’re teens. They’re all great people and all having to grow up in very crazy circumstances. As a private person, I just feel like, leaving people alone — unless you’re talking about their work or what they want to talk about.”

These simple words of wisdom shed light on a truth society has been struggling recently: these kids don’t need more stress, more sexual innuendos said to them. They need to be allowed to be kids. If even the co-stars in their shows are realizing this, it’s time society acted on it and made it a punishable crime to sexualize children.

Blake Lively, former star Serena Van Der Woodsen of Gossip Girls, caught on to this years ago. In 2017, she spoke out against child pornography. She shares the compelling story of how she asked a law enforcement officer what exactly child pornography is. “I was afraid to ask as a mother, you know, because it would be painful to hear, and I felt like I had to ask though, and I feel like I have to share it with you guys now. It is disturbing and I want to warn you, but I feel that it is my responsibility to tell you guys because it is the truth and I believe that if we all knew this, we would dedicate much more of ourselves to stopping it.”

She puts herself out there and claims that we are obligated to act, we need to speak out against this evil in our society affecting our children- even our infants. Lively continues, “It isn’t happening rarely, it’s not happening worlds away, it’s happening here and right now.”