Last week a group of 9 & 10 year old girls gyrating their way through a sexy dance performance horrified many, me included. 

The girls are obviously talented dancers, but the sexy skimpy black lacy outfits combined with the provacative dance moves amount to a degrading and totally inappropriate performance.

Facing widespread criticism, the girls parents have defended their daughters' performance:

"The costumes are designed for movement and to show bodylines..."

This interview makes the whole episode that much sadder for me.  The parents seem to have missed the point entirely.  As Danielle Miller, in the clip below points out, these girls are actually more scantily clad than Beyonce was in the original music video. 

I think one issue that this interview with the parents raises is how public our lives have become.  Whereever your children are, whatever they are doing, there is a chance that their activities are being videoed and that this video could end up on the world wide web.

If these girls had performed this dance a few years ago, it's highly unlikely anyone except the attendees would ever have seen it. However, it's 2010 and someone videoed the performance, put on YouTube and it went viral - it's now been viewed over 2 million times.   The saturation of technology in our lives and the ease at which information can be spread across the world means that as parents we have to be ever more vigilant about protecting our children against exploitation.