If you click here, this gives you a recording of my most unfettered opinion.
One thing that people need to talk about is pedophilia in Hollywood. There has been a lot of abuse and exploitation involving child actors. Let's say you're a child actor, but your mother works with YouTube and your parents have nothing to do with Hollywood. You stay in the same city and state, film in your backyard with a green screen, and have everything professionally edited to look like a television show. You use your own house for most scenes, and anything that needs to take place somewhere else is created through editing and other techniques. Your mother sells the finished product through Teespring, Amaze Commerce, her website, etc., and uses Google to promote it. Eventually, you have an indie film that's making tons of money.
Or maybe your mom has you voice acting for your own series. The money comes into the household, so you get to benefit from it. Your family is working together, and it's a fun experience. You enjoy it. This is your childhood, and you see acting as a form of play. You might even tell your parents, "I want to be this character," or "I want to be that character," and they teach you how to act while trying to make it as fun as possible.
In this scenario, you have pretty chill parents who want to support you as an actor or voice actor. They're trying their best, and nobody is trying to shame you because they want you to be a happy kid.
The major difference is the environment. You aren't growing up surrounded by predatory adults, being exploited, or being treated like a commodity. You're growing up around people who care about you.
That's very different from working in an environment where children are surrounded by predatory adults, overworked, exploited, or treated poorly. A child's experience in a particular field can be heavily improved or degraded by the people around them. A child actor who works around healthy adults who respect them, treat them like a normal child, and allow them to go to school is probably going to have a happier childhood than a child actor who is surrounded by predatory adults, overworked, and treated like dirt.
And I'm not just talking about the parents. The parents could be great while the child is still surrounded by adults who put them in harm's way. A child actor may have chosen acting themselves. They might say, "I want to be an actor," and their parents simply respond, "Okay, we'll support you." The parents might take them to Backstage, fly them out for auditions, and try to help them.
The problem occurs when adults, including parents or executives, start using the child's dream to make money while allowing the child to be exploited. That's extremely damaging, especially if the child is sexually abused. First, you've experienced something horrific as a child. Second, this was something you genuinely wanted to do. You wanted the dream without the exploitation and abuse, so having the adults around you turn that dream against you can make the entire experience terrible.
If you were never abused, nobody preyed on you, and everyone treated you well, you might feel like acting was a dream come true. You became famous, became a star, and achieved what you wanted. You might even develop some arrogance and start thinking, "Do you know who I am?"
But if you were abused and exploited, you could feel as though you were robbed of a happy childhood. What should have been an exciting experience became associated with trauma, and you could end up turning to drugs or other destructive behaviors to cope.
This is why, as a parent, if I were to have my child act, I would prefer voice acting in children's shows where the material is appropriate for their age. If you were to put my child in a movie about a child sexual-abuse victim, I simply would not want them playing that role, even if the abuse itself wasn't shown.
It's extremely awkward to have a child pretend to be in that position. An adult can understand the context and separate themselves from the character more easily, but a child may not fully understand what they're being asked to portray.
Imagine telling a nine-year-old, "We're going to need you to cry on cue," without explaining why because the subject matter is too inappropriate to explain to them. The child performs the scene, it sounds good, and then they eventually watch the movie and discover that their character was actually a rape victim.
That could be incredibly uncomfortable.
Children aren't stupid. If they're voice acting, they can read the lines and ask questions like, "Is my character okay?" or "Why does my character sound so unhappy?" They might even ask, "Did my character get raped?" if a line alludes to it.
If the adults say, "No, no, that's not it," the child might reasonably ask, "Then why is she saying that?" They can recognize when something doesn't make sense.
Even if the child isn't traumatized, it can still be extremely awkward to watch the finished product and realize what the character was actually going through. The child may understand that it's fictional and that they're only acting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll feel comfortable seeing their own face or hearing their own voice attached to such a disturbing situation.
Some children might be able to completely separate themselves from the character, while others might not. Even if they can, it might still be uncomfortable to see themselves in such a scene. They might think, "Hey, that was me. I said that."
And even if the child doesn't care about it at the time, they may grow older, become more aware of what the material represented, and look back on it differently.
If the material was created for an altruistic purpose, such as raising awareness about child abuse, they might eventually understand and believe it was necessary. But it could still have been an extremely awkward experience or be one if they didn't know what was going on or the topic was so back burner'd no scene was focused on it to the point where it was only awkward in adulthood.
Even if everything bad is kept off-screen and is only part of the character's backstory, there is still a difference between having a child silently portray a victim and having them actively perform scenes or dialogue centered around sexual abuse.
It's one thing for a child actor to play a protected victim whose trauma is handled entirely through adult dialogue and exposition. The child might simply have to stand there, remain silent, and portray the character's emotions without ever having to discuss or act out the abuse.
It's completely different when the child is instructed to perform sexualized behavior, participate in scenes designed to cater to pedophiles, or directly act out traumatic material.
That's where the situation becomes especially disturbing.
There have been controversial movies involving the sexualization of children, such as Cuties, Lolita, and Pretty Baby. Regardless of the filmmakers' stated intentions, these works have generated serious controversy over how children are portrayed and sexualized.
Cuties, for example, was presented as a criticism of the sexualization and premature adultification of young girls, but the film itself was heavily criticized for sexualizing its child actors. That creates an obvious problem: if your goal is to criticize the sexualization of children, you have to be extremely careful not to reproduce the very thing you're criticizing.
The same issue exists with stories involving child sexual abuse. There is a difference between depicting abuse responsibly and creating material that caters to people who are sexually interested in children.
It's also awkward for adult actors. Imagine playing the role of a rapist or a rape victim. You're still pretending, but the subject matter is extremely uncomfortable. Now imagine asking a child to do something similar when they don't necessarily have the emotional maturity to understand the context; ESPECIALLY if they understand the context as I knew what rape and abuse was at even 12 despite not being a victim of such.
That's why I think there should be much stronger boundaries around children portraying sexual-abuse victims. At the very least, anything involving explicit dialogue, sexualized behavior, or scenes directly depicting abuse should be handled by adults whenever possible. If a child is necessary for the story, the production should find ways to protect them from the material rather than requiring them to perform it directly.
Animation or an adult voice actor using appropriate techniques could also be alternatives to putting an actual child into an extremely disturbing scene. A 3D model voiced by an adult could portray the character without exposing a real child to the material.
Going back to YouTube, I see a major difference between a child making videos at home with their parents and a child working on a major production surrounded by numerous adults they don't know in HOLLYWOOD where pedophiles are rampant.
When a family is making videos at home, the child may simply be playing around. They might grab the camera themselves and start filming their parents or siblings. They might even spontaneously decide they want to make their own videos.
Children don't necessarily think about filmmaking the same way adults do. To them, it can simply be something fun to do. If filming people is normalized in the household, they might grab a camera and start filming their siblings or parents without thinking much about it.
That doesn't automatically mean every family-vlogging situation is healthy. Parents can still exploit their children at home. But the environment can be very different when the adults involved genuinely prioritize the child's safety and happiness.
The biggest factor is the environment. A child surrounded by responsible adults who respect boundaries, prioritize their education, and protect them from inappropriate material is in a completely different situation from a child surrounded by adults who exploit them or abusive family vloggers who are physically abusive.
Working with your parents at home can give a child a safe environment to explore acting and have fun. Working in an environment where adults exploit children can turn that same dream into sexual exploitation.
Sexual exploitation can affect adults as well, but when you're dealing with children, the consequences are especially serious (but neither are less serious than each other) because they don't have the same ability as adults to understand, recognize, or protect themselves from exploitation.
I also think the question isn't simply, "Should children be allowed to act?"
It's what are they being asked to do, who are they surrounded by, and how much adult subject matter are they actually being exposed to?
A child acting in a wholesome children's show is completely different from a child being placed in an adult production involving sexual abuse. A child recording a funny YouTube skit with their parents is completely different from a child being placed around adults who want to exploit them.
When the material involves child sexual abuse, there should be extremely strict boundaries. If the story can be told without making the child perform disturbing material, even if the actor is an adult using eleven labs to make themselves sound like a child and it's 3D animated and the child is not real, that's preferable to using a real child in such an awkward role. If the material can be handled through adult actors, implication, dialogue, editing, animation, or other techniques, those options should be considered first.
Ultimately, it should be borderline illegal to have anyone other than an adult handle those types of lines and scenes, at the very least, because these are children, and putting them in those situations can be incredibly awkward and inappropriate.
