The innocence fetish

It's a curious truth of contemporary culture that, as innocence has come to be associated with childhood, children are increasingly fetishised. Nothing illustrates this more starkly than the child beauty pageant. A multibillion dollar industry in the United States, child pageantry is the meeting place of a range of ideas about the promise children represent to society: carefree and playful, beautiful and affluent, sublime and unblemished, patriotic and pure of heart. Yet the hard work girls put into their performances and the sacrifices they make to attain them undercut these venerable meanings. For their parents and the pageant industry these children can be lucrative earners. This presents cognitive dissonance. Innocence is not supposed to be useful; it is a value that most feel should transcend profit or personal gain.

More than this, the peddling of children's innocence on the stage or catwalk is seen to place them in danger. The case of JonBenét Ramsey, the six year old beauty queen whose murder shocked and outraged the world in 1996, underscores this sentiment. The daughter of a former Miss West Virginia, JonBenét enjoyed a degree of success on the child pageant circuit, but was unknown to the general public before her brutal (and unsolved) murder. JonBenét's parents and the pageant industry were put on trial by media for objectifying and sexualising this young girl.