Let the Girls Have a Childhood

Discount retailer Matalan found itself at the center of a firestorm in March 2011 after it emerged that the chain was selling padded bras to girls as young as eight. The bras -- pink gingham, in sizes down to 28AA -- were designed to give pre-teen girls the appearance of a developed bust. Some sizes had already sold out.

The outrage was swift and familiar, because this was not the first time. The previous year, Primark had been forced to pull padded bikini tops marketed to seven-year-olds. Other high-street retailers had faced similar accusations. Each episode followed the same script: a product designed for adult women shrunk to children's sizes, public discovery, uproar, withdrawal, apology. Matalan pulled the bras and apologized -- and the cycle reset, awaiting the next retailer.

The controversy landed in the middle of a serious policy conversation. The British government had commissioned Reg Bailey to review the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood; his report, published that June, would call on retailers to stop selling sexualised clothing to children and urge parents to push back. The Matalan episode became exhibit A for his argument: that the industry's default was to sexualise first and apologize later, and that self-regulation kept failing at exactly the same point.

The retailers' defense, whenever offered, was always market demand -- that "tweens" wanted these products and parents bought them. Which may have been true, and which was precisely the problem. An eight-year-old cannot consent to the commercial logic that puts padding in her underwear; she can only absorb what it teaches: that her body is a project, that development is something to simulate before it arrives, that childhood is just a waiting room for desirability.

Let the girls have a childhood. It shouldn't be a radical demand.