Child beauty contest draws fans and foes in Australia

Jul 30, 2011, 7:37 GMT

Sydney - Police were on hand at a Melbourne venue Saturday to keep the peace at Australia's first US-style beauty contest for young girls.

Demonstrators called for laws to ban what one said was the premature sexualisation of children and another said was tantamount to child abuse.

Mothers who had entered their daughters said the hit television programme Toddlers and Tiaras that the contest was modelled on did no harm.

Wendy Lovell, minister for children in the state government of Victoria, ordered child safety officers to monitor the Texas-based Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant-organized event.

'I'd never enter a child into a pageant myself but I think we have to trust parents to make the right decision for their children,' Lovell told national broadcaster ABC.

The top attraction at the two-day contest was to be Eden Wood, but the 6-year-old American child star was kept away for what her mother said was her own safety.

Catherine Manning, from protest group Pull the Pin on Beauty Pageants for Children, said girls under 16 should not be allowed to enter.

She said some 'little girls who have been primped and preened and waxed and spray-tanned to look like Vegas showgirls' were about to be told 'they're not good enough, they're not hot enough, they're not pretty enough.'

Prominent child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said it was 'bordering on child abuse' and urged new laws.

'These children will not come out of this unscarred psychologically and we're all sitting around rather like voyeurs watching it happen,' he told the ABC. 'There's something really quite obscene about that.'