Presented by Point Park University
in cooperation with A Home Within

Friday, June 13, 2008 2 CE Credits for Psychologists 2 ACT 48 Hours for Educators	Saturday, June 14, 2008 2 CE Credits for Psychologists 2 ACT 48 Hours for Educators
Download the Schedule
GRW Theater 2nd Floor University Center 414 Wood Street Pittsburgh, PA 15222 Get Directions	Ballroom 3rd Floor Lawrence Hall 201 Wood Street Pittsburgh, PA 15222 Get Directions
6:30 - 10:00 pm	8:30 - 5:00 pm

Nine nationally renowned experts will join forces to examine the impact of growing up in a sexualized culture on children’s health and development, and how parents, professionals and policy makers can address these urgent issues.

This symposium will address:

• How boys' and girls' gender and sexual development is impacted by our sexualized culture
• The exploitation of black adolescent girls through rap music and hip hop culture
• The dramatic rise in the production and consumption of child pornography
• Sexual exploitation of children through internet crimes and prostitution
• The falling age of puberty in girls as a result of toxic chemical exposures

Featuring nationally renowned speakers:

Sharon Cooper
Gail Dines
Matthew Ezzell
Melissa Farley
Diane Levin
Susan Linn
Sharna Olfman
Sandra Steingraber
Carolyn West

Registration

Register Online
To pay with credit or debit card online, please visit www.pointparkalumni.org/children

Register by Mail
To register by mail please download the flyer and follow the instructions on the registration form included in the flyer.

For More Information
Contact Rachel Dissell, (412) 392-3860 or rdissell@pointpark.edu

About this Symposium

A few decades ago, in the United States, childhood was understood to be a unique and vulnerable stage of development; a time for play and protection from adult preoccupations and responsibilities. In recent decades however, we appear to have jettisoned these norms, and the lines that separate the lifestyles of even very young children from adults are blurring.

In today’s world, children dress like miniature adults, and creative outdoor play is being replaced by media entertainment that is saturated with sex, violence and gender stereotyping. Internet pornography is easily and routinely accessed by boys beginning around 11 years of age, and pornographic depictions of women and girls have been glamorized, mainstreamed and marketed to children through dolls, clothing lines, video games, comic books, music, magazines, television and movies.

The desensitizing impact of a sexualized culture and the rapidly growing market in child pornography place all children at risk for internalizing these impoverished models of gender, and human relationships. While girls are in greater danger of sexual harassment and abuse in a culture that portrays them as objects for male pleasure, boys risk losing a piece of their humanity when they are surrounded by models of male brutality and domination. But poor, abused, and foster children are all the more imperiled. A pandemic of sexual abuse and trafficked and prostituted children in the U.S. speaks to the dangers of raising children in a sexually brutal culture.

A related issue in the ‘sexualization of childhood’ is that girls have begun to enter puberty at increasingly young ages as a result of exposures to endocrine disrupting environmental toxins. Girls as young as eight and nine years of age are developing breasts, and their physical precociousness makes them more vulnerable to the intense societal pressures to look and act sexy.

Speakers

Gail Dines is a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College in Boston, the co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality, and co-editor of the best selling textbook Gender, Race and Class in Media. A leading expert on the impact of pornography on women’s lives, she is alarmed by the increasing use of children as pornographic models, and the growing number of men who seek out child pornography.

Matt Ezzell Matt Ezzell is an anti-violence activist and a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on feminist activism, men’s violence against women, and the reproduction of and resistance to race/class/gender inequality.  An award-winning teacher, he has been facilitating discussions, nationally and internationally, about men's violence against women and the harmful consequences of pornography for over a decade.

Melissa Farley, a clinical psychologist has conducted groundbreaking research on trafficking and prostitution in nine countries. She has written two critically acclaimed books: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections. In research, Dr. Farley has addressed children in the U.S. and other countries who are trafficked  for prostitution. She is the director of Prostitution Research and Education, a nonprofit organization that has begun a multicountry study of johns.

Diane Levin is a Professor of Education at Wheelock College in Boston and an internationally recognized expert on the impact of violence and media on children’s development. Her eighth book, So Sexy So Soon (co-authored with Jean Kilbourne), will be published in August 2008. Dr. Levin is the co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) and Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment (TRUCE).

Susan Linn, is a psychologist at Judge Baker Children’s Center and Harvard Medical School. She is the author of the newly published,  The Case for Make Believe:  Saving Play in a Commercialized World, and Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood, which has been praised in publications as diverse as The Wall Street Journal and Mother Jones.  Dr Linn is the director and co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC).

Sharna Olfman is the founding director of the Childhood and Society Symposium, a professor of child and clinical psychology at Point Park University, and the editor of the Childhood In America book series for Praeger Publishers. Her current book projects include The Sexualization of Childhood (in press) and Global Parenting (under contract). Her recent books include Bipolar Children (2007), No Child Left Different (2006) and Childhood Lost (2005).

Sandra Steingraber is an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health. In 2007, she was commissioned to write a report on the falling age of puberty in U.S. girls for the Breast Cancer Fund. Dr. Steingraber is the author of the critically acclaimed books Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment and Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood.

Carolyn M. West is Associate Professor of Psychology and the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program at the University of Washington.  Dr. West writes, trains, consults, and lectures internationally on interpersonal violence and sexual assault, with a special focus on violence in the lives of African American women.  She is an award-winning scholar and author of "Violence in the Lives of Black Women: Battered, Black, and Blue."

A Home Within

A Home Within is the only national organization dedicated exclusively to meeting the emotional needs of children and youth in foster care. We currently have therapists in 18 communities including Pittsburgh, who volunteer their time in order that these children can have lasting therapeutic relationships. If you are interested in joining us to provide "One Child. One Therapist. For as long as it takes" Please contact Deanna Koch at dkoch@ahomewithin.org or visit our website at www.ahomewithin.org. We need your help.

Continuing Education Credits will be given to psychologists upon completion of this course.  A Home Within is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists.  A Home Within maintains responsibility for this program and its content.