Teen girls have become “oversexualized” in prime-time broadcasting, the Parents...

just acceptable, it’ should be sought after,” said council President Tim Winter. “It will take action from parents, actors themselves and advertisers who pay for TV content … to instigate change,” he said. Among the study’s findings: On shows popular with teens, younger female characters are more likely than older characters to be “portrayed in sexual behaviors” on screen; in the “sexualized scenes” featuring underage characters, 86 percent of the characters were depicted as of high school age; and only 5 percent of those characters communicated “any form of dislike for being sexualized.” And 75 percent of the shows that the council found to have sexualized portrayals of teens lacked the “S-descriptor” in their V-chip ratings, so “it is unclear how existing parental devices like the V-Chip can be useful in helping families avoid explicit sexual content portrayed by underage characters,” the study said.