ABSTRACT
In January 2007, filmmaker Deborah Kampmeier, actor Dakota Fanning, and Fanning’s parents were positioned at the center of a debate over media representations of children and sexuality. Kampmeier’s film Hounddog, which had just screened at the Sundance Film Festival, generated controversy for including a scene in which the central character of a young girl (played by 12year-old Fanning) is sexually assaulted by a late-teenage boy. At a festival press conference, Fanning felt compelled to defend herself as an actor and her mother as a parent against attacks made against their participation in the film, the content and production of which were believed by some to endanger Fanning. The actor herself denied the filming of the sequence was disturbing, in fact pointing to the attacks as more hurtful (Bonisteel 2007).
