Dignity, Children, and Dance

I've been in the dance world since 2000. Over that time period, choreography -- especially for young children (ages 4-11ish) -- has gone from 'adorable' to 'sexy.' This shift has been so widely accepted that today's media (and consumers) actually call these highly sexual dances 'adorable.'

And yet... we are constantly seeing posts on Facebook and Twitter about how poorly girls and women (in particular) are treated. How many are treated as less-than. How many are abused. How many are raped. How rarely/insufficiently justice is done to the perpetrators of these crimes. How intelligent, skilled, creative women are widely seen as nothing more than sex objects. Remember #MeToo?

Who is giving off this perception? Why does this mindset still exist? Are we really doing everything we can to train our children to think otherwise? (Children are the future. Societal change starts with them.)

I won't pretend to know the answers to all these questions, but I want to zero in on something that is frequently a huge part of a little girl's life: dance.

In North America, it's fairly common practice for young girls to take at least a year or two of dance classes. And most families, whether or not they have children in dance classes, are familiar with competitive dance thanks to shows like America's Got Talent, Dancing With The Stars, Dance Moms, So You Think You Can Dance, and the like (to say nothing of the videos floating around social media/BuzzFeed). Even if your children aren't in dance themselves, they're certainly seeing it from their screens, friends, and/or siblings.

Every so often you'll see a social media post where a rape victim is wearing a sweatshirt and jeans holding a sign saying 'This is what I was wearing,' indicating that they were not dressed provocatively at the time of their rape.

Then look at the 'costumes' your children -- daughters, sons, nieces, grandchildren -- are wearing in these videos with millions of views on YouTube. If people in jeans and sweatshirts are common victims of rape, how much more likely are these vulnerable kids in a bandeau and booty shorts to get molested or raped? I haven't even mentioned the highly sexual choreography. And then we wonder why pedophilia is on the rise...?

The siblings and friends of the dance students in 2000 when I first began training are legal adults now, or nearly (and one need not be a legal adult to engage in a sexual crime against a child). There is a whole generation of near-adults who have been raised on a steady diet of child porn made socially acceptable by sequins, stage lights, awards, and clever show titles and distributed in plain sight through every cable hookup and WiFi hotspot in North America.