YOUR SUPPORT MEANS A LOT

Introduction
Beauty pageant for children under the age of 12 cause a lot of harm with long-term effects to the contestants, which can be divided into three main categories;

1. Physical Harm; Promotes body-image distortion and dissatisfaction.
   Toddlers competing in a beauty pageant are expected to perform as perfect little barbie dolls, with spray tan and fake eyelashes, forced into an unrealistic beauty standard.
2. Societal Harm; Over-sexualizes young girls.
   The whole competition normalizes a 2-year-old to walk around the stage with tiny, tight bikinis dressing up as a sexy lifeguard.
3. Emotional Harm; Teaches ethically negative values.
   To participate in a contest where appearance is all that matters lead these little girls and the public into thinking that they, as a female, are nothing more than a decorative object.

All three of these problems have existed ever since the first child beauty pageant began back in the 1960s but it’s not until late 1996, along with the case of the pageant princess JonBenét Ramsey’s murder, that public spotlight finally turned onto child beauty pageants. The public started to voice their concern for the young contestants’ well-being. Despite this fact, about 250,000 total contestants are competing in roughly 5,000 child beauty pageant competitions each year in the United States, according to Occupy Therapy 2013 article.

Goals/Objectives
The objective of this project is to raise public awareness on the dark side of child beauty pageant with the end goal of unraveling the three main problems stated above, which breaks down into;

1. Remove beauty standards
   Being beautiful does not require a tan skin, blinding white teeth, or a skinny leg. To remove the idea of what an ideal body should look like will lessen the rate of mental and physical illness associated with body-image dissatisfaction such as anorexia and depression.
2. Put an end to sexualization over a certain gender
   Although every parent indeed have different parenting styles and values, when it comes to dressing up a child, there are obvious boundaries and norms to follow. Starting from small things like this will hopefully change the world’s perspective with a better understanding that not everything related to a specified gender, in this case women, can/must be sexualized.
3. Value what’s on the inside more than the outside
   The benefit of encouraging kids from a very young age that they are worth a lot more than what other people think of their physical appearance is to help build and boost their self-esteem which will also take part in their character development.

Citation
Photo and Illustration