Contextualising the sexualisation of girls debate: innocence, experience and young female sexuality

This paper aims to contextualise debates on the sexualisation of girls by providing ways of interpreting it from different perspectives – including the perspectives of girls themselves. Asking not are girls being prematurely sexualised but how can this debate be understood as a feature of time and place and how does it relate to the lives of girls as they approach puberty and their first sexual experience? In a parallel approach to other commentaries on sexualisation, the paper takes a deconstructionist approach to recurrent themes of the debate such as the ideal of childhood innocence/protection, to provide an interpretive lens for understanding the emergence of a public concern that places girls at the centre. In doing so, the paper considers four ways of looking: the impact of second-wave feminism; the increased sexualisation of culture; the erotic potential of girls; and the lived experience of girlhood, as perspectives offering some explanatory power for present times.