In powerful testimony about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a USA Gymnastics team doctor, Simone Biles quoted Nelson Mandela: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
At a school board meeting outside of Austin, Texas, last week, a parent read aloud excerpts of a book her son obtained at his school library that explicitly describes sexual behavior between fourth graders.
A 14-year-old Westerville City student athlete was sexually assaulted by his peers in a school locker room last month.
Meanwhile, the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children documents more than 21.7 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation made to NCMEC’s CyberTipline — the highest number of reports ever received in one year. And the BBC has just revealed that reports of sex abuse in the U.K. between children has doubled in a two-year period, increasing from 8,000 incidents in 2017 to 15,000-16,000 in 2019.
We’ve seen the soul of our society, and it is dark. But as shocking and horrific as these stories and statistics are, they are sadly not surprising.
Children and adults are surrounded by a media culture that has been normalizing the sexualization of children for more than a decade while inuring viewers to behavior that should be viewed as repugnant.
It began on prime-time broadcast television with scenes in which adult characters were using profane or suggestive dialogue while children were present. A study by the Parents Television and Media Council found 81.5% of all prime-time broadcast network “family comedies” contained instances of adults using explicit sexual dialogue in front of children. At the same time, the networks started having the child characters themselves engage in sexual dialogue. A 2016 study by the PTC found 109 instances of profanity and 55 instances of sexual dialogue coming from minor-aged characters in a 205-hour study period. Then shows started treating the sexual exploitation of teens as humorous rather than immoral or criminal.
But all of this was really just laying the groundwork for what we are currently seeing in streaming media.
Netflix’s animated series Big Mouth is a TV-MA-rated show about 12- and 13-year-olds going through puberty; though just who the target audience is for this show is unclear.
In our new research report about Big Mouth, we found that the show depicts 12- and 13-year-old children masturbating. It depicts 12- and 13-year-old children in sexual situations, engaging in sexual dialogue the likes of which we have never documented on any television program or television distribution platform. (And we’ve been conducting research about TV content since 1995.)
Certainly, adolescence is a period of life ripe for both parody and nostalgia: It is a time of big changes, big emotions, new experiences, and embarrassing situations. The Wonder Years gave adult viewers the experience of looking back and reliving the good and bad of the middle school years, while acknowledging the fact that, though they might have felt like they were nearly adults, they were still children. Lizzie McGuire was targeted to children who were actually going through adolescence, but in a way that honored and protected the innocence of the viewer.
But that’s not what Big Mouth does. It sexualizes children in a way that renders two outcomes: Either it desensitizes children and adolescents and makes them more comfortable with sexually graphic material, a process known as “grooming,” or it presents children as sexually willing, precocious, and adventuresome to adult viewers who are stimulated by such images.
Neither scenario should be considered acceptable. Neither has a place in our society.
And to make matters worse, the content of this program arguably falls within the definition of child pornography. Law enforcement should determine whether child pornography laws have been broken.
It should shock the conscience to see children sexually exploited for the sake of entertainment and financial profit as they are on Big Mouth. Seeing children used in this way for the entertainment of adults violates our sensibilities, especially when, across the nation and around the world, sexual assault is spiking and women and children are being held in sexual bondage.
Hollywood, following on the heels of its reckoning with the #MeToo movement, should eschew the production and distribution of programming that centers on sexual exploitation. But Hollywood has been silent, only offering glowing reviews of Big Mouth.
Society needs to stand against the sexual exploitation of children before it’s too late.
Tim Winter is the president of the Parents Television and Media Council, a nonpartisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment, and a former NBC and MGM executive.
