The Dark Side of Child Beauty Pageants

1841 Words4 Pages

It was the day after Christmas in 1996 when 6 year old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was murdered, she was found with a skull fracture and there was evidence of sexual molestation. The investigation is still unsolved and ongoing but it is thought that her prominence in the local pageant circuit made her an obvious target for child predators (Bio., 2011). Child beauty pageants are pageants in which the contestants are under the age of 16, many of the participants start performing when they’re as young as a few months old and continue doing pageants until adulthood. Underage beauty pageants have been around for over 50 years, and have now become a common hobby and are most commonly found in the South. While these competitions have gained popularity …show more content…

In one episode of the now discontinued tv show that had 103 episodes (IMDb, 2013), Toddlers and Tiaras, a 3 year old girl dressed up in an outfit modeled after Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman. This 3 year old, dressed as a prostitute flounced along the stage waving to the judges with hands on her hips. (Canning, 2011). Another example of celebrity mimicry for these pageants which sexualize these children that has been aired on Toddlers and Tiaras is when a 6 year old was stuffed into a padded bra in order to dress up as a busty Dolly Parton (Adams, 2012). These pageants then become a breeding ground for dangerous predators, Kidscape, an organization which attempts to prevent the bullying of children, CEO Claude Knights tells the Guardian Magazine ‘"We do know that predators or paedophiles continually tend to justify their interest in children by saying children are sexual beings. That children are now given a channel to become little Lolitas, to be portrayed as older, to almost become mini adults – these are all trends that give legitimacy to that kind of thinking."’ (Day, 2010). The phenomenon of sexual predators making child pageants unsafe has even infiltrated pop culture and has been spoken about in TV shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and in many documentaries such as America the Beautiful: Sexualizing our Youth. These young girls are put on stage and are given things like fake teeth, fake eyelashes and spray tans in order to look older, this is a thinly veiled opportunity to make children look sexy in the same way that 25 year olds looks sexy. Ignoring the looming threat of abuse, dressing and giving a child other beauty enhancements in order to make them look attractive in a way that America traditionally sees adults as attractive robs the children of childhood and will cause them to

Open Document