Very Small Pedo Xxx

Very Small Pedo Xxx

Little women
Mums say they boost self-esteem. Critics say they sexualise kids. We visit the bling-filled frontline of children's beauty pageants.

WORDS Melissa Fyfe
PHOTOS Tim Bauer
VIDEO Tim Young
DESIGN Mark Stehle
DEVELOPMENT Nathanael Scott
MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Felicity Lewis

T hey meet in secret to avoid the protesters, the people they call “the haters”. The haters accuse them of child abuse and want their activities banned. So this event, run on a recent Saturday at Melbourne’s Best Western Airport Motel & Convention Centre, is not advertised to the public. You can’t buy a ticket or find details on the internet. And by 9.10am, the day is well underway in Room 25.

Room 25 Indianna with her mother, Melita Swift, and Melita's fiance, Guy Crane.

Inside this room is a beautiful, freckle-nosed five-year-old named Indianna Swift. Indianna, relaxed and smiling, is still in her nightwear – a pink onesie – but her hair looks ready for the red carpet. “That’s a wiglet,” says her mother Melita Swift, 25, pointing to the cascading brown curls pinned to her daughter’s head. Swift, a childcare group leader from Queensland, knows all about wiglets, and many other things besides, since joining the world of child beauty pageants in January. Earlier, a woman came by to do Indianna’s face. It’s airbrush make-up, which has pleased Swift, because you can still see Indianna’s freckles. The make-up at the last pageant, she says, was ridiculous. “It looked like she was ready to go on a drag queen show.”
Travelling to Melbourne for a national child beauty pageant is not something that the stage-averse Swift thought she would ever do. And she certainly never imagined forking out $2500 on airfares, hotels, make-up and cupcake dresses for this one contest.
“I was one of those judgmental parents,” says Swift, who has her fiancé, an aspiring policeman called Guy Crane, 25, and her mother Raelene Berich, 48, by her side. “I was one of the worst.”

Just so Grandmother Raelene Berich and mother Melita Swift tweak Indianna's costume.

But things changed when Indianna began to walk. All she wanted to do was perform, but she was pigeon-toed and told she could never dance. Searching for something her daughter could physically cope with, Swift found the Follow Your Dreams competitions, one of the nation’s two big pageant systems. She believes practising the simple pageant poses has helped to almost cure Indianna’s pigeon-toed stance.
Like most parents in the growing Australian child beauty pageant industry, Swift believes she is unfairly stigmatised because of the reality-TV series Toddlers & Tiaras (screened here on Foxtel). The show is about the $US5 billion ($7.1 billion) US child pageant industry at its most exploitative, with “momsters” telling their daughters to “smile until it hurts!” and feeding them Pixy Stix candy (otherwise known as “pageant crack”).
Of course, before Toddlers & Tiaras, there was the strange and unsolved 1996 murder in Colorado of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey, who looked like a doll. And after Toddlers & Tiaras came the spin-off Here Comes Honey Boo Boo , a popular show until it was axed when June Shannon, the mother of Honey Boo Boo (real name Alana Thompson), reunited with a child sex offender who had allegedly abused another daughter. Tawdry doesn’t even begin to describe this stuff.

Pout Indianna practises her moves.

Melbourne entrepreneur Kylie Drew, 44, who runs the Follow Your Dreams competitions, knows what Toddlers & Tiaras is like; she was once a guest judge on a pageant featured by the show. Drew, multitasker extraordinaire and self-confessed control freak, has travelled extensively across the US. Six years ago, she imported this particularly American subculture to Australia, setting up one of the country’s first child modelling pageants.
The Australian culture, she says, is different. Unlike the US, children are not judged on their facial beauty. And she says the parents are better behaved than those television “pageant moms”. As dance schools face growing criticism of their skimpy outfits and suggestive moves, Drew says she offers a safe place, and a friendly community, for stage-obsessed kids to strut their stuff and gain confidence.
Can this really be so harmless? “The haters”, as Drew calls them – such as those behind Collective Shout, the campaign against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls – certainly don’t think so. Collective Shout and psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, among others, have called on politicians to ban child pageants, arguing they create “sexualised dolls”, leading to negative body image, eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem.
Yet sitting in Room 25, watching Indianna bouncing on the hotel bed, it is hard to see her as an exploited or troubled child. She’s one of the happiest, most delightful five-year-olds I’ve ever met. Later in the day I’ll find myself confused, even disturbed, by other parts of the pageant experience, but not now. This little girl is fine.
I t’s just after 10.30am and the action is starting in the hotel’s function room. Kaliese comes on stage in a coral cupcake dress. “Kaliese is outgoing,” says Drew, MC-ing from the side of the stage (she has a microphone in one hand, her smartphone in the other: she is simultaneously running a dance competition down the road). “Her favourite movie is Tinkerbell . Her hero is her daddy.”
As soon as Kaliese comes off stage, her mother, Sheridan Larkman – who also runs pageants – puts a dummy in her mouth. Kaliese is 16 months old and, for most of her performance, was in her mum’s arms. But she smiled and waved at the judges, the most you can expect from someone yet to master a fork. In this under-three category, she’s up against some tough competition: 14-month-old Marley, a little ratty after skipping a nap, and Kaliese’s sister Alaska, 2½, who later completely misses the talent section due to her afternoon sleep.
The first category, formal wear, is a crucial section, making up half the final score. Later comes casual wear, “outfit of choice” and an optional talent segment. In all categories, except talent, contestants assume poses and walks. “It’s like they are gliding on stage,” is how Swift describes it.
It’s about poise, elegance and a quality often mentioned in the pageant world called “sass”. Cheekiness, in other words.
The three most important people in the room are sitting in front of the stage: the judges. One is Jessica Martini, Miss Galaxy Australia 2014. Martini has long blonde locks that hit the top of her peplum skirt. She could be a real-life Barbie, except, of course, researchers once estimated the odds of finding a real woman with Barbie’s waist measurement was one in 2.4 billion. The judges enter each contestant’s score for technique, overall presentation and grooming into their laptops.

Judge Jessica Martini, Miss Galaxy Australia 2014.

Next on stage is Neveah (yes, that’s “heaven” spelt backwards) in a diamanté rhinestone cupcake dress. The three-year-old is tentative, a mouse in an open space, and skitters off the stage as soon as she can.
After her performance, four-year-old Tabitha (“Her ambition is to be a rock star, her favourite movie is Frozen ”) receives from her mother a pink toy camera in its packaging. Reward? Bribe? I don’t know.
Then there’s another Marley, who is three. Marley’s mother Raelene Eshun, 36, is in the audience, discreetly giving little cues to her daughter with her hands.
Eshun is an unlikely pageant mother. She has dreadlocks and works in child protection. Marley’s father Edward Eshun is from Ghana, and he and Raelene also care for his daughter Naa, 9, competing today. Edward, a drummer and dancer, sits quietly in the corner, offering advice when asked. Should Naa’s hair be up, down, or halfway up and down? Naa wants to model: “She’s a very humble young girl, but get her on the runway and she just turns into Naomi Campbell,” says Raelene Eshun. So Eshun found Drew’s competitions. And then Naa wanted her sister Marley to join her.
Like most mothers here, Eshun found a supportive, tight-knit community in the pageant world. And Eshun is particularly impressed that the Follow Your Dreams pageants do not score girls on facial beauty. “With the American TV shows, you think it is all about fake eyelashes and that sort of stuff. I put a little lip gloss on my girls. Yes, there are mums who may go a bit overboard, but that’s okay, that’s their choice. My girls do fine without all that extra stuff.”
P ageants are not cheap. This one costs $350 to enter. Dresses are about $150 second-hand or up to $2000 new, depending on how “blinged” they are, as one mother put it. One 12-year-old contestant has a $3000 dress (it’s about making sacrifices for your kids, her devoted dad says, so he buys his clothes from Kmart). So why do parents (mostly mothers) do this? Fame? Maybe. If they stick with the pageant system they might find fame as Jennifer Hawkins and Rachael Finch did after appearing in the Miss Universe competition.
But others, like Raelene Eshun, do it simply because their kids enjoy it. “I think they get confidence and friendships, the obvious stuff,” says Eshun, whose daughters sell their unwanted toys at garage sales to pay for their pageants. “Marley is a very creative, confident little girl. She was born that way and I think it is a fantastic outlet for her to be who she is.” (Marley now has an agent and has modelled for Aldi nappies.)

Double act Cruz Clarke with his mother, Karina, who also competes.

Karina Clarke, 39, has spent nearly $2000 on this pageant (“My husband would kick my butt if he knew,” she jokes). It’s particularly expensive this time because Clarke is also performing with her son Cruz, 4, the competition’s only boy. Clarke, a hairstylist, started Cruz in pageants because “he was pretty obsessed with the stage”. He often wins “Prince” or “King” of his category, but has never pulled off a “Supreme” title. It’s a tough ask to win against the “sparkly” girls, Clarke admits, so she adds “some bling” to his little suits.

Sharp Veteran "Prince" and "King" Cruz.

Quite how Cruz, or anyone else, knew he loved the stage before he got up on one in his first pageant is just one of the questions I find myself puzzling over during what turns out to be a long and bewildering day. But for many mothers – such as Clarke, Eshun and Swift – the pageant journey begins with the booming baby-show industry. That’s where their child first discovers the thrill of a stage. This was true for Sheridan Larkman, mother of Kaliese and Alaska. But why put your baby in a show?
“As a mum, it’s just something that you do,” says Larkman. “Every mum does it at one point or another.” Not this mum, I think. I would never put my 19-month- old in a baby show. But I do not say this out loud.
A lexis Turner is one of those How-does-she-do-it? mums. The 30-year-old from Brisbane is studying a double degree in interior and graphic design, runs her own business, and has a nine-year-old son, a six-year-old daughter and a five-month-old baby. Not only this, but she manages to have perfectly shiny, straight, black, shoulder-length hair and looks gorgeous in all black and jewelled sandals (she’s also wearing a diamanté badge that says “Pageant Mom”). Turner is not a baby-show sort of person, either, but she did watchToddlers & Tiaras. One day, her daughter Ayva – a pretty, olive-skinned little girl with long brown locks – came in while she was watching. “She was hooked,” says Turner.
Ayva was then about three, and Turner thought it was a phase. She took Ayva to dancing classes to see if that would dissuade her from pageants. It didn’t. So 18 months ago, they joined the pageant world. “I think at first she just loved the idea of dressing up and looking pretty and all that stuff,” says Turner. “She was actually quite shy and we didn’t know how she would go on stage. But since then she’s improved so much. Her public speaking is excellent now. She still likes the whole dressing-up thing, but the actual pageant day is the big thing for her.”
This pageant day is not going so well for Ayva. Or so Turner thinks. “The stage is different here, it’s thrown out Ayva’s steps,” she says, anxiously. It’s now time for outfit of choice and Ayva is up. Her song is Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini .
The bikini, it turns out, is neither itsy bitsy nor teenie weenie; it’s actually a halter-neck one-piece with about 10 centimetres of flesh-coloured material in the middle and ruffles above her bottom. Towards the end, there’s a slightly disturbing “booty shake”, a shimmy of her bottom – not at the judges, away from them. But, on the whole, the performance is kind of cute.
“That made my skin crawl,” Fairfax video journalist Tim Young says at lunch. “It was bordering on pornographic.” Young is a father of a three-year-old daughter and, obviously, a man. Was he seeing things differently because of this? Or am I just a bad feminist for thinking it was odd but benign? I can’t work it out. It’s as if I saw a puppy and he saw the Big Bad Wolf.
I mention his reaction to Drew, who seems perplexed. “If you think there was something sexual about that, then there’s something wrong with you,” she says. “And you obviously haven’t been to a dance competition.”
This is why child beauty contests are a minefield: everyone sees the same thing, but interprets it in totally different ways.
I t’s not until the 10- to 12-year-olds come on stage that I notice a feeling in my gut. It’s an uneasiness, a low-level panic. This is a strange age grouping; straddling puberty’s dateline. Not yet a woman, or a teenager. Sometimes not a girl anymore.
Some contestants are girlish and dress demurely. Others, such as 12-year-old Gigi, whose hero is Mother Teresa, look 18 and womanly in a busty formal dress. You could land a small aircraft on her fake eyelashes. Another contestant, 12-year-old Siena – who wants to be a famous actor and an ambassador for Cambodia – is in a Kylie Minogue showgirl outfit.

Harlequin Gigi, 12, takes to the stage.

I want to press pause, stop the show. I want to tell them, “ You are only 12 ; there’s plenty of time and, frankly, the hair, the nails, the make-up, it’s a burden. Why carry it so early?”
Later, I confess these feelings to Drew. “They are not little kids and they are not grown up,” she says. “I think that age group is a tricky age in pageants and is tricky in life. It depends on the child. I don’t think we should be in a hurry for them to grow up, but I don’t think putting a dress on someone makes them grow up in a hurry.”

Pizazz Siena Uremovic in full flight.

Meanwhile, Siena’s mother, Nicole Nelsey, is anxious. She’s asked us if this article will be positive; she’s sick of the negativity around pageants. Nothing her daughter is wearing or doing today, she says, is as provocative as the things you see in her dance competitions: “You see kids [aged] five or six years old shaking their booty but the dance world doesn’t get slammed, the pageant world does.”

Prize Gigi with her promotional poster and tiara.

Finally, as the older teenagers – the 18-year-olds – glide on stage, it feels like they’re from another era. It is so shiny, the girls’ poise and smiles so perfect, they could be selling household appliances in a 1950s television commercial. And that is what Drew says she offers: old-fashioned values and the kind of book-on-the-head deportment once found in finishing schools.
But there’s something else. I feel weighed down by the depressing uniformity of it all. The make-up just so, the straightened, then curled hair, the pro-forma beauty. I realise, later, I’ve had this feeling before: around the Melbourne Cup racing carnival.
T here’s a 24-hour rule in Kylie Drew’s pageants. No expressing an opinion about the results on social media, or to the director – that’s Drew – for 24 hours. “I am tired of people, in their anger, ripping the business to shreds. Everyone thinks their child is beautiful and their child is the winner. But when you put 35 people in a room who are all beautiful and all talented, someone is going to win.” Since running pageants, Drew has seen all types of parents: single mothers who scrimp to afford pageants, affluent families and, she admits, “crazy psycho mothers”. But there are no psychos anymore. She prepares parents now by making sure they understand their child might not win.

Hummer time Organiser Kylie Drew guides contestants into the post-pageant treat, a spin in a limousine.

Drew designs the prizes to cater for two parent types. The first type subscribes to the no-losers philosophy, emphasising participation over winning. Drew dislikes it. “You don’t ever ‘fail’ now, you are just ‘non-compliant’. I get annoyed by it constantly.” Nonetheless, she knows her market. She showers the contestants with dolls, plaques, stickers and crowns. And in a group of four, there is never a fourth, just two equal-thirds.
But for the other parents, the ones who want their child to be judged, there is a clear prize hierarchy and an absolute winner in each age group. “The ones who want their child to be judged often go home with the very big crowns,” says Drew. “They get regular coaching, they practise, they are very good.”

Aglitter Lexi Nolan, a pageant veteran at 17.

It’s after 3pm now, nearly crowning time. The girls climb back into their formal wear for the ceremony. The young ones play as the older girls sweep by in long gowns, some with sashes and tiaras. The experience seems completely outside a five-year-old’s normal life. Indianna seems fine now, but is this a psychological time bomb? Some American child beauty contestants have spoken as adults of the “haunting sense” they “have no face” when not made up for the stage, and “the need to be perfect at everything”.
Drew’s daughter Lexi Nolan, 17, has some perspective on this. She started in pageants at age 11, has successfully competed across Australia and overseas, and says pageants are about determination and working towards goals. “From pageants you gain so much self-confidence, and from that you feel beautiful,” says the aspiring Broadway performer. “I just wish people would stop judging it for what they see on TV – which is an American show – and at least go to a pageant and talk to someone who does it.”
D rew calls the winners to the stage. Ayva wins Grand Supreme for her group, to her mother’s surprise. Marley wins Supreme for formal wear and Cruz picks up King of his group.
But the star of the day – the Ultimate Grand Supreme for ages 0-10 – is Indianna. She’s collected five crowns, including a 50-centimetre monster that’s almost half her size and lights up like a Christmas tree. Her mother Melita Swift is crying. She has always been like this, one of those crying mothers. “I cry if she doesn’t win anything and I cry if she does,” she says. “It’s just the amazement of seeing your child do something like that.”

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