The Statement of Ed Balls and Post-Vatican II Evangelisation
Editorial FAITH Magazine May-June 2010 - Further Material
Sexualisation Review: Extracts
The Sexualisation of Youth, by Dr Linda Papadopoulos, published 25 February 2010
6. What we are seeing now is an unprecedented rise in both the volume and the extent to which [sexualised] images are impinging on everyday life. Increasingly, too, children are being portrayed in "adultified" ways while adult women are "infantilised". This leads to a blurring of the lines between sexual maturity and immaturity, effectively legitimising the notion that children can be related to as sexual objects.
7. Children and young people today are not only exposed to increasing amounts of hyper-sexualised images, they are also sold the idea that they have to look "sexy" and "hot". As such they are facing pressures that children in the past simply did not have to face. [...] There is a significant amount of evidence that attests to the negative effects of sexualisation on young people in terms of mental and physical health, attitudes and beliefs.
10. When researchers examine the content of young people's web pages they find that young teens are posting sexually explicit images of themselves on social networking sites,
and self-regulating each other with sexist, derogatory and demeaning language.
18. It is not now a case of if a. young person will be exposed to pornography but when. [...] 27 per cent of [14- to 17-year-old] boys are accessing pornography every week, with 5 per cent viewing it every day. [...] 58 per cent had viewed pornography.
21. Sexualised content is everywhere and, often, children and young people are accessing it alone.
32. One in three teenage girls aged 13-17 [who had had an intimate relationship of some kind, which was 88 per cent of the whole group] had been subjected to unwanted sexual acts while in a relationship, and one in four had suffered physical violence [this was from a thorough poll conducted for the NSPCCin2009].
Also from section 5, p.47:
Each day, search engines deal with around 68 million requests for pornographic material — approximately a quarter of all searches on the net.