In his Sept. 19 article, "Pregnant at 11 as kids decide to be adults" (a film review of "Kodomo no kodomo"), Mark Schilling writes, "In the real world, girls who conceive so young are often the victims of poverty and abuse and risk severe physical and emotional problems."
Can't we unpack this? I would suggest that the issue is not the girls who conceive so young who are victims of poverty, but rather the girls whose circumstances force them to be visibly pregnant. It's absurd to suggest that only the poorer classes are victims of child sexual assault.
Second, the "fantasy" situation in this film is rare. It's like using a talking dog to illustrate the entire canine species. Do children experiment? Yes. Are pregnant children usually in that situation as the result of Lolita-ish precociousness toward same-aged children? No.
I suspect that we watch fantasies such as this movie and "Juno" because reality would force us to look at the family members who are by far the most likely to abuse children. As for the physical and emotional problems, perhaps our fantasy child is capable of mothering (what about the father?), but adult women still routinely die in childbirth. I would rather not contemplate what damage a pregnancy would deliver upon an 11-year-old. The small, toss-away sentence in this article conceals a large world of problems and pain.
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