Dockside Tarts and Modesty Boards: A Review of Recent Policy on Sexualisation

In recent years, the "sexualisation of childhood" has moved into the centre ground of public policy and debate internationally, despite the conceptual confusions and inadequate evidence surrounding the processes denoted by the term. This paper focuses primarily on the most recent of several UK government-commissioned reviews and reports, the Bailey Review of 2011, warning that its proposals may amplify the voices of organised campaign groups at the expense of young people's, potentially damaging their rights to sexual self-expression and information. In addition, however, it argues that we should attend to how the Review delineates boundaries between the personal, the social and the political and between the public and private, to understand the kind of contract between state and citizen that policy on "sexualisation" attempts to put in place.