Young models at risk in exploitative industry

Back straight, chin up, eyes focused, lips pouted. Gerren
Taylor knows how to work what she’s got on the haute couture
runways. Juggling a budding modeling career and pre-algebra,
12-year-old Gerren leads a childhood unlike other
seventh-graders. 

Gerren’s modeling job may seem harmless and glamorous to
some, but the price of child labor is in fact much greater than
what Gerren is getting paid. Gerren Taylor is a 5-foot-10-inch
example of youth exploitation by the modeling and clothing
industries. 

Although Gerren’s mother tells the L.A. Times that she
“understands that sexuality is part of the fashion and
believes she can protect her child from exploitation,”
Gerren’s mother fails to see that Gerren has already been
exploited. The sexualization of children like Gerren Taylor is
in itself an exploitation which has dire consequences.

The modeling industry boasts of launching Kate Moss, Naomi
Campbell and Brook Shields into stardom before they even received
their high school diplomas. They walked on the runway before
they walked across the graduation stage. However, the education
that this fierce industry offers consists only of hard lessons on
sexuality and self-esteem. Every step of their careers, models are
judged based on their looks and how well they can present
themselves. 

Seduction is key in modeling, and children are catching on
quickly, even if they may not understand it. Melanie Cishecki,
executive director of Media Watch, a non-profit organization aiming
to eliminate such sexual imagery in the media, told The Canadian
Press, “When you see young girls portrayed in a sexualized
manner, it normalizes it and people start to look at children as
sexual beings.”

Sexualizing young girls has far reaching effects, affecting not
only those in the industry, but all that are exposed to
advertising. Girls learn indirectly that self worth is based
on appearance. One’s self-esteem may be shattered by
rejection and its implications ““ you aren’t skinny
enough, pretty enough, tall enough. Children learn to judge
themselves and others not based on personalities, but by waist and
bra sizes. Not only that, these girls are judged based on
impossible standards.

The average model weighs 23 percent less than the average
woman. According to the National Eating Disorder Association,
social factors that contribute to eating disorders include
“cultural pressures that glorify “˜thinness’ and
place value on obtaining the “˜perfect body’ and narrow
definitions of beauty that include only women and men of specific
body weights and shapes.”Â As children are constantly
exposed to peers that are a size 0 or size 2, they may look to
anorexia or bulimia. 

The issue screams of targeting youth for new markets reaching a
new high (or should we say a low, in consideration of products such
as Abercrombie & Fitch’s thongs for girls?). Marta Weber,
a forensic psychologist in Medocino, Calif., also told The Candian
Press, “Over my lifetime of 50-plus years, I have seen
children becoming sexualized at a younger and younger
age.”

Furthermore, it seems that now more than ever we are hailing it
and not fighting it. There are controversies and protests
against sweatshops, revealing the grueling, inhumane conditions of
unfair child labor. However, modeling is glamorized, and its dirty
laundry is tucked away in the closet.

While the modeling industry claims to take the age of models
into consideration, its concern involves underwear or nude
modeling. However, the clothes are only a part of the problem.
It’s the sexual role and mentality that children are asked to
take on that’s the more pertinent issue.

What will we do when girls want to trade their Barbies for
bikinis and teddy bears for teddies á la Victoria’s
Secret? 

Tam is a second-year communication studies student.