National virtue and the ‘media sexualisation of children’ discourse in Australia

The public meetings

The after-work meeting organised by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA, 2013) in October 2009 was attended by about 70 people, mostly women, of a range of ages, who collectively appeared to be middle class. The YWCA provides services and programmes for young women and describes itself as ‘the leading voice for young women in South Australia’. The members see themselves as part of a global feminist movement. The main guest speaker, Melinda Tankard Reist, shared the platform with local psychologist Rita Princi and Anne Bunning, the CEO of the YWCA. The Anglican Archbishop and a state senator were in attendance. Tankard Reist is an author and commentator who came to national prominence in 2000 with a widely distributed book about (against) abortion (Tankard Reist, 2000). She has been widely associated with the similarly anti-abortion women’s organisation Women’s Forum Australia (WFA, 2011) and has strong links with ‘conservative Christian networks in Australia’ (Baxter, 2007). The talk at the YWCA coincided with the launch of Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls (Tankard Reist, 2009a), her collection of articles by some of the leading Australian contributors to the ‘media sexualisation of children’ discourse. Tankard Reist based her talk around a powerpoint presentation showing scores of popular culture images illustrating her argument. ³ Each image was, so she said, worse than the one before, and the combination of her visual and verbal presentation drew audible gasps and exclamations of shock from the audience throughout. As she presented images of, or addressed to, girls and young women that she claimed were unacceptable she asked, more than once, ‘Why isn’t this illegal? Who said this was ok?’ She presented the example of an article titled ‘Oh My God My Boyfriend Wants Me To …’ from Dolly, a market-leading magazine aimed at teenage girls, which contained descriptions of oral and anal sex and ‘handjobs’. Tankard Reist proffered an alternative response to the clinical information in Dolly for 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds who are confronted with their boyfriend’s requests: ‘Hello, call the police; hello, tell your parents; get the guy arrested; find another boy to hang out with’.

The other two public meetings I attended, variations of the same event titled ‘Bratz, Britney and Bralettes’, were promoted jointly by the long-standing Australian Council on Children and the Media (ACCM) and the recently formed Kids Free to Be Kids (KF2BK, 2011). The event had previously been staged at Melbourne Girls Grammar, a prestigious private school, in August 2009 and shortly after the Adelaide meeting, it was put on twice in Perth, in collaboration there with the Western Australian government’s Department for Communities (ACCM, 2011). The audiences of about 300 people who attended each of the Adelaide evening meetings were, I presumed, made up predominantly, but not exclusively, of parents, mostly women, from the two private schools where the events were held. The first ACCM/KF2BK event was chaired by Matt Abrahams, a local ABC radio personality who brought both fatherly gravitas and (often comedic) media style. It featured Julie Gale, a 40-something mother and stand-up comedian and founder and driving force behind KF2BK who gave a humorous performance about her campaigns to keep the public environment child-friendly by keeping it free of sexually explicit material (see Gale, 2009). Legal academic and now President of ACCM Elizabeth Handsley also spoke, giving an overview of legislative possibilities for better regulation of advertising and media. The final, and best-known, speaker at the first ACCM/KF2BK event was Steve Biddulph, psychologist and well-known best-selling author of books about boys and men (see Biddulph, 2010, 1997). Biddulph is a master performer who tells stories, both moving and funny, in order to convey his message. He drew from his clinical practice to criticise media sexualisation and offer insights into the sexual worlds of teenage girls and the consequent dilemmas faced by their parents. The second Adelaide event, held six months later, featured Abrahams, Gale and Handsley again. The Adelaide Anglican Archbishop, Jeffrey Driver, and Rita Princi, also spoke. On this occasion another nationally well-known psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg, a specialist in adolescent health and regular media commentator, was the most prominent speaker (see Carr-Gregg, 2005, 2006). He was pacey and funny and peppered his psychological analyses with anecdotes from his own parenting as well as observations from his private practice.

The combination of Abrahams’s light-hearted approach and Gale and Biddulph or Carr-Gregg gave both the ACCM/KF2BK events a humorous and uplifting tone. Biddulph’s and Carr-Gregg’s humour relied on accounts of the foibles of adolescents and the everyday flaws, mishaps and ironies of (middle-class) parenting and family life, often self-deprecatory. As elsewhere in Australian political discourse (Rolfe, 2010) the speakers’ humour both relied on and reinforced audience views, which coincided with their own, and enhanced the speakers’ credibility. The message delivered was an affirmation of the authority of (middle-class) parents over (sexualised) media and the new digital world of communication technologies and, indeed, over adolescents. Arguably it also relied on and delivered a nostalgia posited against a present time where young people negotiate sexual relationships in an ‘increasingly fluid and uncertain environment’ (Powell, 2010: 1) and indeed, where all manner of identities and boundaries are fluid and uncertain (see Brown, 2006: 699). In his contribution to Getting Real Biddulph (2009: 167), for example, laments the loss of a time of ‘nuanced relationships, which girls used to devour in books and poetry’, before ‘Aunties, grandmas, older women friends, even mothers themselves, became much less available to nurture and reassure, challenge and inform adolescent girls’ and when ‘fathers, uncles and grandfathers … ideally provided male affirmation and thoughtful conversation free of sexual pressure’. Biddulph’s appeal to this imagined past for girls echoes the close relationship to nostalgia that is widely observed of constructions of the innocent child. As Patricia Holland (1992: 15) has argued of visual images of children ‘In the constant renewal of childhood the lost harmonious past can remain forever present and promise a future in which innocence is regained’.

This tone was in stark contrast to the shock and outrage delivered by Melinda Tankard Reist’s presentation at the YWCA meeting. The shock value of the images she showed was emphasised by the cumulative effect of speedy presentation of images one after another. ⁴ In her introduction to Getting Real she writes (Tankard Reist, 2009b, 33, 7) that ‘there’s a lot of dark material in this book’ and ‘some readers might take offence at what appears in this book and wish they hadn’t picked it up’. The necessity of facing up to unpleasant and disturbing material also underpinned her talk. This daring to deliver a necessary confrontation with offensive material resembles the literary production of ‘shock’ as observed by cultural historian Nicole Moore (Moore, 1997: 189). In order for taboos to be broken, Moore writes, ‘a reader’s acceptance of these taboos is presumed’. So, in order to produce shock in response to sexualised representations of children, the representations must be presented as outside the audience’s world. That is, the audience’s innocence in relation to sexualised images of girls is affirmed, as is the assumed virtue of this innocence. At the same time it is assumed that the audience will know what these images mean. The point here is that presenting images as shocking rules out consideration of other possible interpretations or inquiry into, for example, what the girls and young women (or boys or young men) who read the magazines or watch the MTV programmes or access adult porn might make of these texts. ⁵

The YWCA and the ACCM/KF2BK events did not only deploy different affective registers. Tankard Reist’s talk focused on the degradation of girls as subjects in their own right and in this sense drew on a nascent feminism (without explicitly using the term). Further it is arguable that her talk constituted ‘women’ as the subject of the ‘media sexualisation of girls’ discourse. The ACCM/KF2BK events also drew on a simplistic ex-nominated feminist analysis of media representation (see Egan and Hawkes, 2008b: 297–298). But the concern at their events was for girls and young women as subjects of psychological development (Tankard Reist was less reliant on psychology to make her argument) and as part of the family unit. The subjects of the discourse as it was deployed at the ACCM/KF2BK events were ‘parents’.

Antipathy to corporate consumer culture was a central feature in the discourse of ‘media sexualisation of children’ at all three public meetings. It is important to note that as well as drawing on contemporary political opposition to the effects of global capitalism this opposition (in the epistemological sense) was essential to the origins of the European idea of the pure and innocent child in 18th–19th-century Romanticism. Joanne Faulkner (2010: 109–110) shows how at this moment of the co-evolution of capitalism and ‘the relegation of children and sex to the private sphere’ the innocent child represented, by definition, the other of the tarnished world of ‘society and the sphere of production’.

Recuperating national virtue

Introducing ‘national virtue’ into an account of the ‘media sexualisation of children’ discourse in Australia is not to argue that the discourse is not about children’s, especially girls’, sexuality. And it is not to diminish Walkerdine’s analysis (2001) that the discourse is a defence against the acknowledgement of dangerous adult, especially male, sexual desires. As Egan and Hawkes (2008a: 311) argue in their historical analysis the discourse mirrors and revives ‘earlier patriarchal discourses on the pathological nature of women’s sexuality’. But the politics of sexuality are often caught up in the politics of national identity: the 19th- and early 20th-century discourses to which Egan and Hawkes refer constructed ‘the precocious child’ as ‘capable of contaminating not only the future life of the adult but also the sanctity of the race and nation’ (2008a: 310, emphasis added). Arguing that the media sexualisation discourse is part of a shoring up of white Australian national virtue draws on a rich history of the interrelation between ideas about the child and dominant conceptions of western society, national health and colonial rule (Burman, 2010: 17–20; Stoler, 1995: 137–164). As Burman notes ‘the widespread slogan that “children are our future” highlights the links between individual children, notions of social progress and national welfare’ (Burman, 2010: 1).

In this context I want to suggest an alternative genealogy for the ‘media sexualisation of children’ debate in Australia. What if, instead of the usual reference to the 2006 Corporate Paedophilia report as the origins of the debate, we started with Bringing Them Home (National Inquiry, 1997)? This was the 1997 report of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) inquiry into the generations of Indigenous children removed from their families during the 20th century as part of deliberate government policies of assimilation and, as some have described it, ‘cultural genocide’. This would locate the ‘media sexualisation of children’ discourse in a widespread national discussion about the nature of the national past, and present, in relation to the treatment of children. In this genealogy Corporate Paedophilia is but the latest in a series of (contested) national inquiries and reports into the lives of children in Australia called for by various groups within the Australian body politic.

It is hard to overestimate the significance of Bringing Them Home to the Australian national imaginary. The political contestation that followed its release, a re-energisation of ‘the history wars’ begun in contest over Australia’s past during the nation’s 1988 bicentenary (Macintyre and Clark, 2003), has had far flung implications. The report’s recommendation that the federal government apologise to the stolen generations, and the then conservative Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to do so through his four terms in government, made the issue of ‘the apology’ one of the key political issues of the Howard era. When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took office after the 2007 election one of his government’s first major political acts was his apology to the stolen generations in February 2008. Opinion varies on the significance of that apology. Some have argued (e.g. Marren, 2010: 8) that it represented a coming to terms with ‘the cult of denial’ in relation to Indigenous peoples that has characterised white Australia national memory. Others, including many Indigenous commentators, see it as (Foley, 2008: 3) just the latest ‘in the long line of historically fraudulent acts and dishonest gestures that typify the Indigenous experience of all governments in Australian history’.

A history of recent Australian nationwide concern about the treatment of children does not just include the debates about the treatment of Indigenous children. In the wake of Bringing Them Home there have also been federal Senate reports on child migrants brought to Australia during and after the Second World War (Lost Innocents [Senate Community Affairs, 2001]) and on non-Indigenous Australians taken into care during the 20th century (Forgotten Australians [Senate Community Affairs, 2004], and numerous state and territory government inquiries into the care of children by the state, past and present. ⁶ The reports create a growing documentation, if not collective awareness, of the widespread and systematic state-endorsed abuse of children, including their sexual abuse, throughout the 20th century in Australia. Indeed, in 2009 Prime Minister Rudd delivered another national apology – to the ‘Forgotten Australians’. Notwithstanding the two subsequent national apologies many of the recommendations of both federal and state reports remain outstanding. A recent history would also include the continual media stories of underfunding, crisis, and systemic breakdown in government departments charged with the protection of children at risk of abuse and neglect. ⁷ As well as the revelations about the abuse of children in state care there have been constant revelations of the abuse of children within the Christian churches during the same period (see Porter, 2003). (The Anglican Archbishop made reference to this matter at the 2010 public meeting I referred to earlier). The abuse of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in state and church care has also been the subject of a number of feature films, most notably Rabbit Proof Fence (dir. Noyce, 2001), which concerns the removal of Indigenous children from their families, and most recently Oranges and Sunshine (dir. Loach, 2011) about child migrants to Australia in the mid-20th century. The implication of church and state coincided in an extraordinary political event in 2003 when the then Governor-General (the head of state), Peter Hollingworth, resigned over his poor handling of allegations of child sexual abuse while in his previous position as Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Brisbane (Baird, 2009). As I write the federal government's Royal Commission into institutional responses to the sexual abuse of children, motivated by sensational revelations about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, has commenced (Cullen, 2012).

The Australian national public has been confronted with the fact that children in great numbers have been systematically abused while in the care of the state and the churches. The viability of ‘innocence’ as an account of the state of childhood and of the nation and its historical past has been sorely strained. According to Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Moreton-Robinson, 2004: 225–226) it was ‘the virtue of the white nation’ that fuelled ‘the history wars’. More specifically, she argues, it is ‘the virtue of white heterosexual men’ which is at stake, because it is they who ‘should be venerated and represented, for as agents of history they embody the true character of the nation’. At this point Moreton-Robinson’s observation brings the issue of national virtue and national accountability in response to the Indigenous stolen generations (and other children) to a coincidence with Walkerdine’s analysis of the ‘media sexualisation of children’ discourse. Both point to the virtue of (white) heterosexual men as a key cultural possession at stake in the respective debates on which they comment. The coincidence of their arguments allows a reading of the media sexualisation discourse as not only a defence against acknowledgement of dangerous adult sexual desires but also a defence against national (white, middle-class, patriarchal) culpability for the abuse of children, Indigenous children in particular.

By blaming ‘the media’ for all manner of sins against children the media sexualisation discourse homogenises and gives all power to an aggregated body of texts and reading practices which are imagined as outside the various social and cultural formations through which they are made meaningful (Giroux, 2000: 15–16). As US cultural studies and education writer Henry Giroux argues, the image of the paedophile, like the media (he specifies the sexual dangers of the Internet), ‘becomes a convenient excuse for ignoring the role that middle-class values and (other) institutional forms actually play in threatening the health and welfare of all children’ (2000: 16). Giroux identifies values such as ‘conspicuous consumption, conformity, snobbery and ostracism’ as well as reductions in welfare programmes and the undermining of public education (2000: 17) as forces that reproduce ‘racial, class and gender exclusions’. But the public meetings about the media sexualisation of children come to the defence of ‘girls’ not by naming and opposing middle-class values and the institutions and strategies of the neo-liberal state but by protecting their innocence against the imagined dangers of sexually explicit popular culture.

What about the girls?

I am not without sympathy for those who attended the meetings I observed who were looking for solutions to problems that beset them or their daughters or their students or clients (some members of the audiences identified themselves as health workers or teachers). It is important to acknowledge that the ‘media sexualisation of children’ discourse refers to some undeniably serious concerns for young women. But the conservative framing of the problems facing girls and young women and so the solutions offered by the sexualisation discourse are not the only ones available. Taking a significantly different slant, British media and cultural theorist Angela McRobbie describes the ‘thin tightrope’ (2009: 84) of an increasingly planned, managed and surveilled pathway for girls and young women. They are offered certain resources and freedoms while simultaneously being expected to become (2009: 15) the paradigmatically independent and self-managing individualised subjects of neo-liberal discourse. This increasingly narrow but intensely promoted space is one where feminism is, McRobbie argues, ‘fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated’ (2009: 12) despite the fact that gender inequality and ‘old-fashioned’ sexist hostility persist (2009: 85; see also Baker, 2008). Anastasia Powell’s Australian research notes similar silencing particularly with respect to ‘young women’s continued experiences of sexual pressure, coercion and violence’ (Powell, 2010: 78, emphasis added). McRobbie sees the rising numbers of disordered young women as an effect of their loss of any publicly allowable language to register their protests (2009: 95). Not all feminist writers agree with McRobbie. With respect to sexualisation in particular Feona Attwood (2009: xxii) argues that ‘we need to move beyond the simple assumption that sexualisation is in the interests of boys and men’ and instead attend more to the experiences of young women. She argues (2009: xxiii) that ‘self-governance of sexual matters should not simply be taken as a slide into neo-liberalism’ but an opportunity for the development of an informed sexual citizenship’.

The 21st century requires a feminist politics that situates its critique of gender relations in a critique of neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the global economy as much as in a critique of girls’ magazines, the fashion industry and the fraught conditions of the new sexual freedoms that young women take up (McRobbie, 2009). Such a politics needs to accommodate ‘the challenging paradoxes of a commercialized cultural environment re-made by feminism’ (McNair, 2009: 71). Rebecca Munford (2009:196), for example, argues for an embrace of new opportunities for female sexual pleasure and power but always ‘in conjunction with a relentless critique of and intervention in the still pervasive forms of – frequently girl-powered – “ruthless sexism” in mainstream culture’. The Australian media sexualisation of children discourse as evident at the public meetings I attended constructs ‘women’ and ‘parent’ subjects whose desire is for either a nostalgic world for children centred in the family, cordoned off from ‘adult sexuality’, where the main strategy for safety is the reinstatement of an imagined boundary between public and private, or, in a different emotional register, censorship and prohibition and the law as a form of protection. The discourse does not allow young women a voice to express protest except through a call for their protection from not only sexual media but also ‘inappropriate’ sexual knowledge, and a nostalgia for an imagined time located before they were born. Whether through a politics of nostalgia or outrage the discourse is ‘centred in fixing and enforcing meanings, conserving certain ways of life, and repressing and regulating desire’ and openly affirms ‘moralized state power’, hallmark features of neo-conservatism in the USA as identified by Wendy Brown (Brown, 2006: 692). That it is a hybrid political rationality, bearing traces of feminism and left-wing anti-corporatism as well as key signs of neo-conservatism is not unique (Brown, 2006: 696). The relative absence of a more expansive feminism which would deliver (Powell, 2010: 78) ‘alternative models for an active, desiring female sexuality’ is, similarly if depressingly, nothing new.

But the ‘media sexualisation of children’ discourse does not only engage discourses of gender and sexuality. It offers a response to a sense of national crisis, also a function of the neo-conservatism that Brown identifies in the USA (Brown, 2006: 699). I have argued that in Australia this is a crisis in national virtue brought about (in this context) by constant allegations of the sexual (and other) abuse of children inside mainstream institutions, past and present, and, in particular, revelations about the cruelty of various governments throughout the 20th century to Indigenous children and their families. The ‘media sexualisation of children’ discourse exonerates those who are constituted through it from complicity in these problems. It (re-)establishes boundaries that are imagined to have existed in some time prior to this cultural confusion – boundaries between public and private and those categories that are underpinned by this binary: men and women, adult and child, media and family, sex and love. It also (re)establishes boundaries between middle class and working class and, I have argued, between good nations that care for their children and bad nations that do not.

The emotional registers created at the meetings I attended enable the audiences who are drawn to the media sexualisation of children discourse to distance themselves from their inevitable and often privileged location as citizens of a nation still wedded to its colonial past (as well as their implication in complex constructions of desire). In reinventing the family and the state as the proper authorities in the sphere of sexuality the discourse avoids acknowledging the centrality of these institutions as past and present sites of (sexual) danger for children. Reinvesting in innocence, whether pertaining to childhood or to the nation, restates long-standing foundations of colonial modernity that impede rather than facilitate historical accountability, including to children treated so badly in the past. It also impedes progress in gender equality and the sexual welfare of children in the present.