Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery

Whether controversial or taken for granted, pictures of children are everywhere - in magazines, newspapers and advertisements, on greetings cards and the Internet. Picturing Childhood demonstrates how these familiar images reveal a view of childhood which is constantly changing. With debates over children’s rights in the 1970s, child sexual abuse in the 1980s, violent children in the 1990s and precocity and consumerism in the 2000s, the traditional image of childhood innocence survives only as a form of kitsch. Using images from a wide variety of sources, this text considers the popular imagery in relation to news, education, welfare, charity and consumerism and asks what implications does all this have for the ways in which children themselves are treated?