2017-03-27
Girls today are growing up in a “moral abyss,” say Dr. Helen Wright, telling an annual conference in Britain that she is greatly concerned by the “erosion of the innocence of childhood in the 21st Century.”

Indeed, society must wake up ”to the profound damage we have inflicted” on today’s girls “due to creating a society that is highly sexualized,” agreed Andrea Williams, chief executive officer of Christian Concern.

Dr. Wright, president of Britain’s Girls Schools Association and headmistress of the exclusive boarding school for girls, St Mary’s, called for a return to Christian ethics.

“What hope have we got of safeguarding our children’s sacred childhood if they are knocked off their feet on the nursery slopes of life by an avalanche of images and malign influences?” she told the girls association conference. “And make no mistake, this is what is happening.

“It is time to take up the drawbridge of the liberal dogma of the past which has left us with the moral abyss of the present.

“If parents can’t see anything wrong in dressing up their children in ‘Future Wag’ T-shirts and letting them wear make-up, high heels and ‘mini-me’ sexy clothing, then something is intensely wrong in our society,” she told conference attendees. “I truly believe that issues such as the protection of childhood, of young girls and of young women, and speaking out against the premature sexualisation of children, are vital.”

Dr. Wright also criticized TV programs such as the X Factor, where she said contestants were “encouraged to be at each other’s throats.”

“Qualities such as bullying and arrogance are glamorized and become synonyms for ambition and drive,” she said. “Young people look up to these so-called stars who have themselves been catapulted into a spotlight which can be far too much for them.

“The only solution now for society is a wholesale return to Christian sexual ethics and moral restraint.”

Wright’s comments followed a British government report commissioned by the Home Office which warns that children in the United Kingdom are being increasingly exposed to sexual imagery — and a summit meeting at Prime Minister David Cameron’s Downing Street residence which addressed how to tackle the commercialization and sexualization of childhood. Cameron recently launched a government-supported website to give parents a place to air their concerns about inappropriate products, advertisements or services.

Indeed, a crisis is at hand, writes Sonia Poulton in the Daily Mail newspaper: “Many young girls have low expectations of life because they have been debased and we, their parents have enabled this. Our girls have been sold the notion that the ultimate achievement

is to be a WAG, a topless model, a Big Brother reject or gyrating like a lap dancer in a pop-lite girl group.

“The result is a generation of girls who are wide-eyed and vacant with cinched-in waists and aimless smiles. They are all BRAT-itude and no substance and their innocence has been swept away like a sand drawing when the tide comes in.
“Defenders of this child abuse — for that it what it is — say that it takes a perverse mind to see children in a sexualized way.

“Oh get real, already. Most people know the difference between a young girl modelling themselves on mummy and trying on her dress and lipstick and a five year old wearing a t-shirt which proclaims ‘so many boys, so little time’ or an eight-year-old buying a padded bra.

“I used to love pretending to be my mum and would swirl around in front of her dressing room mirror wearing one of her outfits, but what we have now is a whole new, and unwelcome, universe.”

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