Shame, Blame and Contradictions in Protectionist Anti-Sexualisation Discourses on Girls' Dress

In the new millennium a media discourse has arisen in the Anglophone press that discusses girls' dress as 'sexualising'. 'Protectionists' have come to build a causal link between 'harms' that may befall girls and the clothing that they wear. The tone and content of these discourses has in turn been criticised by 'liberal' academia. It condemns these as further placing girls at harm through a disproportionate focus on girls' activities and sartorial self-expression, creating an air of self-surveillance. This thesis argues that this can cause harm in two ways. Firstly, the fear and management of sexualisation may displace public discourses about the actual abuse of children that happens in and outside of the home. Secondly, this is particularly advantageous for boys and men, who are now excluded not only of responsibility, but from the discourse altogether. Nonprotectionist feminist scholarship further recognises a contradiction within antisexualisation debates. Protectionist writers set themselves up as authorities on the cultural perspective of the care for girls and place girls simultaneously as impressionable, immature and untrustworthy, and hence in need of regulation, but also as alluring and corrupting and hence implicated in their own sexual victimisation.

This thesis adds to the existing liberal debates by undertaking a systematic study of select government reviews, newspapers and populist manuals. While sexualisation as a topic has enjoyed scholarly investigation, this thesis examines these protectionist contradictions in sexualisation discourses through a specific analysis of dress as a social communicator and point of contention through cultural and fashion theory. This thesis places itself within non-protectionist feminist research which critiques protectionist propensity for equating innocence with purity and sexual inactivity in a moralistic enterprise, which criticises and shames girls in their dress and considers them corrupting of others' innocence.