The Dangers Of Child Beauty Pageants

With the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in 1996, whether or not the contests should be available for children has sparked off a lively debate.(“JonBenet Ramsey Murder Fast Facts,” 2015) While many consider that messages of beauty pageants do not help children develop correctly since the origin of the beauty pageants are not to encourage women to show their virtual beauty to the public, but rather entertain people by dressing in different types of clothing. Others maintain that some contests have evolved to also incorporate personality, intelligence, talent as judged criteria. With the fact that the promotion of an ideal of adult feminine features from beauty pageants adds to the pressure on the children to conform to it, this

Young girls who compete in pageants are used to keep thin because over a certain weight is not considered glamorous.(Wonderlich, Ackard, Henderson, 2005) For this reason, many young girls in the pageant are more likely to ignore their bodies’ warning signals and thus sacrifice their physical and mental wellness (American Psychological Association, 2007). They world deliberately stay at the appropriate weight by starving themselves in order to win. This makes them easier to have extreme diets and forgo food although they are hungry, eventually leading them to suffer from insomnia or depression or even develop eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa(“ Child pageants bad for mental health,” 2011). Also, youths will have greater chance to be underweight and suffer from nutrient deficiency in which anemia is most predictable disease. Therefore, it is obvious that children’s beauty contest is detrimental to their

While the nature of child competition is not totally sexual, it creates an environment in which wearing makeup, hair extensions, revealing outfits and learning provocative poses or facial expressions are done to emulate adult women. There has been a report that shed light on how sexualized images of girls were strongly correlated to the sexual abuse where 450,000 American children were reported as victims.(Giroux, 2000) The damages of these sexual crimes could become imprinted into their minds and generally exert the most debilitating physical and psychological effects. If we do not stop their participation, it not only exposes the participants to the danger of pedophilia, but also millions of vulnerable youths may have to worry about their safety. This can be expected from the fact that there was a rapid increase in the number of child sexual abuse since the beginning of the first Little Miss America pageant in 1960s. (Lee, 2009; “Palisades Amusement,” n.d.) Therefore, parents should be prohibited from allowing their children to engage in the child’s beauty pageants so as to wipe out the concerns and to avert real life