Sex for kids

Rachel Johnson, in a Spectator article reprinted in the Sunday Times, argues that many children’s books have become gratuitously explicit. She will find much agreement for her case that children are being introduced to violent and sexual material at too tender an age, but she does not advance her case with great clarity. Although she says that she admires Philip Pullman, she writes that it is "well known" that he did not intend his novels to be children’s books, "but they have been sold and marketed as such". Perhaps that is well-known, despite being a distortion of Mr Pullman’s position; but it cannot be used to advance the case, as Ms Johnson appears to do by placing it in the same paragraph, that authors "put in all this stuff about sex, death, child abuse, substance abuse, family breakdown and global warning as a crowd-pleaser".
Earlier in the piece, Ms Johnson writes: "Whereas Doing It [by Melvin Burgess] and the forthcoming Julie Burchill book, Sugar Rush, which I am told is a joyful exploration of the sunlit teenage world of drugs and lezzies, sound unquestionably grim and narrowly grotty." In that sentence, "I am told" and "sound" do not advertise the authenticity of Ms Johnson’s argument.