Right: Protesters from "Pull the Pin", an organisation lobbying against child beauty pageants, gather at the Victorian Parliament in May, 2011. Similar protests were held in other states after Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant announced an Australian competition.
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Arguments against child beauty pageants
1. Beauty pageants sexualise children
It has been claimed that the manner in which many child beauty pageant participants dress and behave sees they mimicking the behaviour of adult contestants. This is claimed to be undesirable because it imposes a premature sexuality on children and robs them of interests and activities that are better suited to their stage of development.
Dr Phillip Brock, the chairman of The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has expressed concern that the pageant objectifies and judges children 'against sexualised ideals'.
Dr Brock has stated, 'Sexualisation is a process whereby a child's value is based on their appearance or behaviour to the exclusion of other characteristics, and attractiveness as a child is equated with being sexy.
[We] would like to emphasise the potential developmental harm that can be associated with the sexualisation of children and tweens.'
'Pull the Pin' is a protest group opposed to child beauty pageants. Like many critics of these pageants, its members object to them on the basis that 'little girls parade wearing make-up and sexy clothes'.
Glenn Cupit, a senior lecturer in child development at the University of South Australia, has stated, 'The title is "child beauty pageant" but if you look at the way the children are dressed and required to act, it's actually a child sexualisation pageant.
The children are put into skimpy clothes, they are taught to do bumps and grinds. It's not looking at children's beauty. It's a particular idea of what beauty is, which is based on a highly sexualised understanding of female beauty.'
Martin Pakula, the Victorian shadow attorney-general, has stated, 'There really is no place in Victoria for these pageants ... they are not some innocent baby bonnet parade, they are something a bit more insidious.'
Neil Hastings, the Liberal member for Hastings, has stated, 'It is common sense and most of the community agree with it, that children deserve to be children and it's our job to make sure that they are allowed to do that.'
2. Beauty pageants can damage a child's self-esteem
It has been claimed that participating in beauty pageants is harmful for the self-esteem of young people. At a formative stage in their development they are encouraged to see their self-worth largely in terms of their physical attributes and to strive for standards of appearance that are inappropriate to their age. This, it is argued, is likely to cause problems for them in later life.
Martina M. Cartwright, an adjunct professor of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Arizona, has stated, 'Many experts agree that participation in activities that focus on physical appearance at an early age can influence teen and/or adult self-esteem, body image and self-worth. Issues with self-identity after a child "retires" from the pageant scene in her teens are not uncommon. Struggles with perfection, dieting, eating disorders and body image can take their toll in adulthood...
Intense participation in activities that spotlight physical appearance ... [make] self-worth and self-esteem inextricably tied to attractiveness.'
FRM Model Management director, Mr Stephen Bucknall, has stated, 'It is hard enough for those in their teens to deal with the ongoing hardships of self imThe Age: but to put this on to those barely past infancy is disgusting.'
It has further been noted that competing in child beauty pageants is likely to be harmful to a young girl's self-esteem as the likelihood of her not winning a place in such competitions is far greater than her likelihood of success. Therefore many girls are being shown that their worth centres on their appearance and, as evidenced by their failure to win, that they are not pretty enough.
Adolescent and child psychotherapist, Collett Smart, has stated, 'It's cruel to judge little girls on their appearance. To say to a young girl, no, you're not pretty enough. So we're setting them up for plastic surgery and Botox injections and as a society, we must not sit by and let that happen.'
Anti-pageant protester, Catherine Manning, of Pull the Pin on Beauty Pageants for Children, has stated, 'We are very concerned that over in Northcote today, there are little girls who have been primped and preened, and waxed and spray-tanned to look like Vegas showgirls being paraded in front of a panel of judges, to potentially be told they're not good enough, they're not hot enough, they're not pretty enough.... I believe that will have an impact.'
Professor Cartwright has further stated, 'Adults need to be aware of the potential long-term impact super-competitive, beauty-driven pursuits can have on a young girl's psyche.'
Psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, who specialises in adolescent mental health, has stated, 'In my view if you were to say to me that you put your child in that situation I would absolutely suggest to you that it's bordering on child abuse.
These children will not come out of this unscarred psychologically and we're all sitting around rather like voyeurs watching it happen. There's something really quite obscene about that.'
3. Beauty pageants encourage subsequent eating and other disorders
It has been claimed that the unnatural focus on appearance may help to encourage eating and other disorders in children.
Stacey Weiner in an article published in The Washington Post in 2007 noted that the children in beauty pageants had been linked to three of the most common mental health problems of girls and women: eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression.
In a 2002 study of seventh-grade girls who viewed idealized magazine images of women reported a drop in body satisfaction and a rise in depression.
A Sydney doctor and child health advocate, Ramesh Manocha, has warned that the competitive element can have long-term negative consequences such as eating disorders.
William Pinsof, a clinical psychologist and president of the Family Institute at Northwestern University has stated, 'Being a little Barbie doll says your body has to be a certain way and your hair has to be a certain way. In girls particularly, this can unleash a whole complex of destructive self-experiences that can lead to eating disorders and all kinds of distortions in terms of body image.'
In a 2005 study by Anna Wonderlich, of the University of Minnesota, eleven women who took part in child beauty pageants were compared to eleven women who had not. The study found pageant contestants scored higher on body dissatisfaction, interpersonal distrust and greater impulsiveness.
Adolescent psychologist, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, has stated, 'All of the evidence says that this sort of early sexualisation of young people is associated with negative body imThe Age: disordered eating, depression, anxiety, low self esteem. It's simply toxic to the young people of Australia.'
4. Participants are too young to give informed consent
It has been claimed that the participants in child beauty contests are too young to give informed consent. According to this line of argument, even if a child appears to enjoy the pageants and claims to want to participate, the little girl is judged to be too young to know what is in her long-term best interests and whether the pageants are potentially causing her harm.
A Minor Consideration is a non-profit foundation formed to give guidance and support to young performers. One of its members, Karen Nussbaum, has stated, 'Most stage mothers claim that their child wanted to enter the pageant on her own. Does an eight-year-old girl know what is best for her? In 1996 seven-year-old Jessica Duboff died when her parents allowed her to fly a plane across the country because she liked it. Should parents rely on their children to know what is best for them?'
Education consultant and parenting expert, Kathy Walker, has stated, 'These young children are not able to make informed decisions to enter this competition - it is their parents. It is disempowering and gives [kids] a message that life is about competing against each other instead of developing their own sense of self and learning to like who they are - not what they look like.'
Catherine Manning, from protest group Pull the Pin on Beauty Pageants for Children, has stated, 'We'd like to see an age restriction, probably 16 years of age and then a code of conduct around not just beauty pageants but children's performance, activities where they're quite often encouraged to engage in adult beauty procedures like waxing and spray tanning just to perform.' Such age restrictions would give young people an opportunity to exercise informed consent.
5. Child beauty pageants pander to parental ambitions
It has been claimed that many child beauty pageants exist to service the needs of parents rather than the best interests of their children.
Child psychologist, Dr. Robert Reiner, stated in 2006 that many parents whose children took part in pageants were attempting to live vicariously through their young daughters and were often 'very pushy parents who, for a variety of reasons, didn't get what they wanted when they were children.'
Australian dance centre director, Barbara Komazec, has stated, 'There are those parents out there who wanted their kids to do it because the parents had wanted to do it.'
Australian parenting expert, Maggie Dent, has similarly explained, 'As far as stage parents go, the difference between encouraging your child and pushing them is really important. When you get those parents who are really pushy and demanding and interfering, that's when you've got a stage parent, which actually a lot of the time is really detrimental to the child's progress ... the pushiness and the interference is getting confused with encouraging them and supporting them in what they want to do.'