Anthropolgists looking at the dawn of the 21st century may surmise that we were schizophrenic: a society that idealised childhood, but demonised problematic, sexualised adolescents.
New research suggests that the first dark signs of adolescence – menstrual blood and pubic hair – are now often occurring in children as young as eight or nine. Whither childhood?
Moreover, despite what appears to be the best combined efforts of parents and the media to sit hard on the lid of this particular Pandora’s box, the early onset of puberty in some children is almost certainly directly linked with early sexual activity. You may not want to hear this, but we may now be living in a time when Lolita is no longer a literary study in perversion, but a unisex, medically and sociologically substantiated reality.
The research – conducted by Professor Jean Golding of the University of Bristol on an initial sample of 1E150 eight-year- old children in Avon in the United Kingdom – reveals that one in six eight-year-old girls has started puberty, with signs of breast buds, pubic hair or both, compared with only one in 100 a generation ago. Similarly, one in 14 eight-year-old boys now has pubic hair when, back in the Sixties, this was a mark of the over-13s.
“We don’t actually ask parents if they are surprised by the early onset of puberty in their children,” Golding tells me. “But it’s incredible how many of them, off their own bat, will say: ‘Thank goodness you asked that question!’ They are all worried that their child is exceptional, but we are able to reassure them that it does appear to be extremely common.”
Part of the blame for the ongoing blizzard of misinformation, confusion and anxiety concerning puberty could be put down to the fact that, until very recently, the international model for all research on pubescence was a British report compiled in 1962 by Professor James Tanner. For his study, Tanner focused on a mere 200 boys and girls in children’s homes in London. There followed a wait of almost 40 years, ended in 1997, by research on 17E000 American children, aged from three to 13, which was conducted by Dr Marcia Herman- Giddens. In the United States, child sexuality is said to be even more a problem – with “fast sex” replacing “fast food” in the schoolyard. As Herman-Giddens’s study concluded that the average age for puberty had gone down dramatically, raging hormones could well be to blame.
Two British paediatricians, Rosemary Jones and Fiona Finley, are currently trying to set up their own study, which would feature thousands of British children. The chief problems for Jones and Finley appear to be time, money, and, remarkably, the still prevalent Victorian repressiveness – the “cover the table legs” primness – of British culture.
“You’ve got to have a really good excuse to look at a well child’s body in this country,” says Jones. “We can show children photographs and life drawings all we like, but sooner or later, we’ve got to ‘have a look’ at some of them.”
She says that part of the routine check of a boy’s pubescent development is sizing their testicles with a set of differently sized beads. “At a certain size, a threshold of about 4mm, it’s an indicator that hormone production is under way,” she says. “But it’s not as if you can go around doing these tests on the street!”
Of course, if it were just a matter of physical development, the public would probably be about as interested in all this as they would be in stat sheets on how generally improved health is affecting the size of children’s feet (rather a lot, as it happens). The fact that pubescence is, by definition, sexual, transforms this research into scientific dynamite – not to mention a primal tinderbox of morality and unease.
Just as some children are said to be drowning in premature hormones, so is society reeling from the prospect of hordes of “horny” children, some as young as 10, having sex in the streets. While for paedophiles this could be construed as a weird form of encouragement, most adults would be appalled by the thought of suddenly sexualised children.
Indeed, it seems that parents are colluding in either ignoring, or, even worse, fetishising the problem of “teenage sexuality”. Hence the routine media hoo-ha over under-age pregnancies, which always seems to subtly suggest that only those girls who “actually get pregnant” are having sex, while the rest of childkind are presumably still busy playing with Lego.
Observing this wilfully ostrich-like reaction, one could almost start wishing that parents would start growing up intellectually as fast as their children are obviously doing physically. However, the real question is, what do we do about it? “Hairy”, “budding” and even “sexually active” they might suddenly and scarily be, but they are still children. So how do we go about helping them?
The experts seem to agree that the best way forward is a combination of early information, and better (much better) communication. The common consensus is that, however they look or act, it may take some time for early pubescents to catch up emotionally with their fast- changing bodies, and they need all the support they can get.
These schoolkids are not the pages of Lolita come to life, nor are they manifestations of our “declining standards”. They’re ordinary young people, at the mercy of their own biology, who are in need of understanding, tolerance, and the occasional bawling out. Children in adults’ skin.