Dec 16 2010
The Sexualization of Teen Girls on Television
Do you have children in your home that watch television? 
The Parent’s Television Council, a non-partisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment, has released a new study that parents/caregivers should look into. The name of the report: Tinseltown’s New Target: A study of Teen Female Sexualization on Primetime TV–and it examines teen female sexualization in the media.
Their findings are deeply troubling: When underage female characters appear on screen: more sexual content is depicted; teen girls seldom showed a negative response to being sexualized; more sexual incidents occur outside of any form of a committed relationship; and there is less accuracy in the TV content rating when teen girls are involved
Some of their major findings include:
• Underage female characters are shown participating in a higher percentage of sexual depictions compared to adults (47% and 29% respectively).
• Only 5% of the underage female characters communicated any form of dislike for being sexualized (excluding scenes depicting healthy sexuality).
• Out of all the sexualized female characters depicted in the underage and young adult category for the entire database, 86% were presented as only being of high school age.
• Seventy-five percent of shows that included sexualized underage female characters were shows that did not have an “S” descriptor to warn parents about the sexual content.
• Based upon a definition established by the American Psychological Association of “healthy” vs. “unhealthy” sexuality, the study findings show that 93% of the sexual incidents involving underage female characters occurred within a context that qualified as “unhealthy.”
• The data revealed that 98% of the sexual incidents involving underage female characters occurred outside of any form of a committed relationship.
• The data show that 73% of the underage sexualized incidents were presented in a humorous manner or as a punch line to a joke.
You can find the report at http://www.parentstv.org/FemaleSexualization/Study.htm