I just need to rant about this picture for a second. I don’t know the context, and I don’t know who took it, but staring at it is making my blood pressure sky-rocket.

What you see before you is the picture-perfect representation of the rise of pedophilia in our society, and it makes me sick to my stomach. Look at the girl in the picture (sidenote: is that Britney Spears??). She is wearing purposefully non-skimpy lingerie to make her look younger (white = virginity and purity), but it’s still meant to be sexy because her skin is on display and she’s towering in platform heels. Elaborate measures are being taken to make her look as infantile as possible, which means that the eroticism of the photo lies in that very infancy. There are  DOLLS AND STUFFED ANIMALS strewn about her bedroom, for goodness’ sake. This is clearly supposed to be a perverted fantasy glimpse into a young girl’s bedroom because do you know who is most often associated with stuffed animals and dolls? Children. And not just sixteen-year-old-girls-on-the-cusp-of-womanhood, either. Actual children. Five year olds. Eight year olds. You get the picture.

The sexualization of children has become a growing problem in the world today, with sex trafficking of minors increasing in mind-boggling and nausea-inducing numbers. The numbers of children being molested and sexually assaulted grows year after year, and it is only getting worse. Little girls even younger than three compete in pageants where they are dressed and painted like miniature grown women and put on parade for adults to assess their physical appearance. There’s an entire genre of media dedicated to eroticizing prepubescent children.  Little girls are being gang raped by grown men and are then blamed for being sexually aggressive. For God’s sake, CHILD PORN IS A THING THAT EXISTS.

I firmly believe that this is happening in part because images like this are prevalent in every form of media, so it’s practically impossible to get away from. And because it is so prevalent, it becomes normalized, which is really freaking scary. It is becoming normal to sexualize children. So again, while I don’t know the context of this photograph (and frankly, I don’t care), I know that this sort of thing needs to be called out. Blatant pedophilia (like the image you see above) needs to be called out because it is a crime that takes place in silence and shadows. It’s something so awful and ugly to contemplate that too often it goes unreported because people don’t want to face the fact that it is real and that it affects hundreds of thousands of children.

I don’t know about you, but I refuse to live in a world where the normative sexualization of children is accepted and unquestioned. As I mentioned before, we are starting to see what that looks like, and it should make you angry. It should make you furious. It should make you fight.