The living dolls

Amber is 7 years old and loves Miley Cyrus. She also likes watching music videos on YouTube and making up dances to accompany the songs of JLS, her favourite boyband. But, most of all, Amber likes to collect stones.

To all intents and purposes, Amber is a confident little girl with an array of enthusiasms and interests. But it is hard not to notice as she talks that her eyelids are powdered with gold eyeshadow. Her hair has been styled with two sparkly hairclips and she is wearing a pale pink dress studded with fabric flowers. Later, she will show me a certificate she was given for taking part in the Mini Miss United Kingdom competition earlier this year. Because besides being a normal 7-year-old, Amber is also an aspiring child beauty queen.

The child beauty pageant circuit in the UK has seen a recent explosion in popularity. Although such contests are commonplace in America, where they have spawned a multimillion-dollar industry, they are a relatively new import to this side of the Atlantic. But in a Britain increasingly enamoured with the instant fame of reality television stars and image-conscious glamour models, demand for child beauty contests has risen exponentially.

A throng of contests

Five years ago, there were no mini beauty pageants in Britain. Today, more than 20 are held each year with thousands of girls (and sometimes even boys) taking part. A typical beauty pageant will consist of several rounds, often including an "evening wear" section, where children parade down a catwalk swathed in taffeta and Swarovski crystals, and a talent round, in which contestants will display a particular gift, such as singing, dancing or baton-twirling. For a successful child beauty queen, the rewards can be lucrative — the winner of Junior Miss British Isles can expect to pocket £2,500 — but it takes a lot of work.

To their critics, such beauty pageants are exploitative, pressurising children to adopt adult mannerisms that they do not fully understand and enforcing the message that physical appearance is all-important. Claude Knights, the director of child protection charity Kidscape, says pageants "give young girls the signal that it's OK to value yourself along a superficial dimension. It's not about the whole person". Yet many in the pageant industry insist it is a harmless pastime that instils young girls with confidence and self-esteem.

"I personally see pageants as a positive thing, especially with the ladette culture that we have," says Katie Froud, the founder of Alba Model Information, the UK's only independent modelling advice service.

Both sides of the debate will be examined in a forthcoming six-part BBC Three documentary series, Baby Beauty Queens, which gives a vivid depiction of the world of miniature tiaras and satin sashes: There are Fake Baked 11-year-olds with heavy false eyelashes and feathers in their hair; there are precocious 6-year-olds performing provocative dance routines in tight-fitting, spangly outfits; there are young girls in lipgloss and mascara, their hair pumped up with hairspray and their eyes densely lined with kohl.

Entering a pageant is thus a time-consuming and costly process, involving entrance fees of up to £200. On top of that, parents can expect to pay several hundred pounds for suitably eye-catching outfits.

Amber's mother, Sally, a vivacious 36-year-old former air hostess, entered the Yummy Mummy section of the contest alongside her daughter. She did not win, although she makes it clear she thinks this was an oversight on the part of the judges. "It's an obsession, really, of mine that one day I can be in the limelight," Sally says.

I wonder if there was part of Sally that wanted to enter Amber into the pageant because of her own desire for attention. "I don't force her," Sally insists. "She's always wanted to be in front of the camera or on TV. She's been acting and dancing from the age of 3. For us the pageant was a new experience. It was something different."

It is clear that Amber is a bright and charismatic girl but does entering such a young child into a pageant encourage her to grow up too quickly? "I don't foresee any problem as to what I've done with my daughter personally," says Sally. "I don't allow Amber to wear mascara. If it's a special event, I do her eyes and give her a little bit of clear lip gloss but she's beautiful as she is. She's a child and I believe that her beauty comes from within."

A cultural trend

In the end, despite her obvious prettiness and natural charm, Amber did not win the Mini Miss UK title. Instead, she was awarded the prize for Mini Miss Manners.

"My heart broke when she didn't win," Sally admits. "I had some expectations of coming somewhere even if it wasn't the top winner."

But when I ask Amber whether she minded not scooping first prize, she doesn't seem particularly bothered. "No," she answers, matter-of-factly. "I think I deserved to be a winner, not second or third. Someday I'll win." Sally nods approvingly, as though an important life lesson has been learnt. "Good girl," she says, beaming at her daughter.

In many ways, the rise in child beauty pageants can be linked to an increasingly pronounced cultural trend to treat young children as mini adults. Supermarkets have been criticised in the past for selling padded bras and pole-dancing kits aimed at children, while the popularity of scantily clad female bands such as the Pussycat Dolls among pre-teenagers would seem to suggest that girls are growing up far more quickly than they used to.

In 2009, a poll of 3,000 teenage girls showed that more than a quarter would spend their money on their looks rather than their studies, while one in five had considered plastic surgery. An Ofsted study of almost 150,000 children aged 10 to 15 found that 32 per cent worried about their bodies, while a recent BBC survey highlighted the fact that "half of girls aged 8 to 12 want to look like the women they see in the media and six out of ten thought they'd be happier if they were thinner".

According to Knights, the beauty pageant industry is, at root, about "the commercialisation ... of childhood. These young girls are precocious. What they begin to do is look older, they acquire these veneers. They look assertive, they look confident but how deep does that really go if it's built on such an ephemeral notion?

"Aesthetic, external attributes have a place but they should not be the sole means by which a child should measure themselves."

Does she believe that such contests could encourage paedophilia? "There is a concern about that," Knights acknowledges. "We do know that predators or paedophiles continually tend to justify their interest in children ... That children are now given a channel to become little Lolitas, to be portrayed as older, to almost become mini adults — these are all trends that give legitimacy to that kind of thinking."

In America, where the tradition of beauty pageants is far more entrenched, the industry has been overshadowed by the murder of 6-year-old child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, who was found physically abused and garrotted in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colorado, on Boxing Day 1996. The case is still unsolved.

Lack of legislation

In the UK, one of the most disturbing aspects of the child beauty pageant scene is that it remains almost entirely unlegislated. "There have been a number of pageants that have been set up, that get all the entrance money off the girls and then never run the competition," says Froud. "You literally can just say, ‘I'm running a beauty pageant'."

But Froud is also quick to point out that a properly run pageant can be beneficial. Many of them donate a slice of their profits to charity and, she says, the contests can promote "grace and good manners and wanting to do good. The girls who enter learn about focus and they can start to learn better behaviour".

In fact, many of the mothers and daughters I speak to are remarkably sensible and see beauty pageants as part of a well-balanced life, rather than the sole focus of it. Frequently, it seems that the children are the ones badgering their parents to enter rather than the other way round — one 10-year-old girl went door-to-door asking for sponsorship from her local community and raised £300 towards her pageant outfit.

It is an example that does much to challenge the beauty pageant stereotype of pushy parents and spoilt, doll-like children with glassy-eyed stares professing their fervent desire for world peace. In many cases, a contestant's personality seems to flourish under the spotlight.

There are girls who genuinely find that the pageant scene, far from making them anxious about how they look, actually boosts their confidence and their self-image. Eleven-year-old Chloe Lindsay from Belfast was bullied for years at primary school for being overweight.

With her self-esteem at rock bottom, Chloe started attending a local dance school where a couple of her friends were already having lessons. Soon, she was entering "freestyle dance" competitions which take place almost every weekend in town halls across the UK. Contestants are required to dress up in flamboyant feathered and bejewelled costumes reminiscent of the Rio carnival. For competitions, Chloe wears heavy make-up, false eyelashes and has an all-over spray-tan.

"I like the dressing up because it makes me feel more confident in myself," she says. "I look at myself and go, ‘Wow!' Just to know I'm going out there and looking brilliant, it makes you feel so pretty and gives you a lot of confidence."

And yet, however much entering pageants can prove to be a positive thing for sensibly minded and ambitious young girls with firm adult guidance, there are some who question whether children can ever truly be said to form their own decisions, independently from their parents.

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at University of Kent and author of several books including Paranoid Parenting, says modern parents are encouraged to make a heightened emotional investment in their children and to view them as extensions of themselves. "Parents tend to adopt an extremely narcissistic view. So every time a child shows the slightest interest in anything they seize on it. ... With the powerful impulse towards celebrity culture, the parental impulse becomes unrestrained.

"No child is entirely autonomous. If a child says ‘This is what I want to do,' it's generally not 100 miles away from what the parent wants. It's relational decision-making rather than a strong-willed child making decisions totally on their own. These pageants are not for children to entertain other children. What one sees here is adult fantasies fuelling this thing. It's for adults. It's a couple of steps up from Crufts."

Still, it is hard not to dismiss the sneaking suspicion that at least part of the opposition to pageants in the UK stems from a class divide — the idea that there is something a bit tacky, a bit infra dig about parading one's children on the stage rather than doing the comfortably middle-class thing of taking one's little darlings to piano lessons or entering them for chess tournaments. Last year, a study into child beauty pageants in the United States for the Harvard University Gazette questioned 41 mothers who participated in an average of five pageants a year. The researcher, Hilary Levey, concluded that mothers of lower income and poorer education entered their children into the contests because they wanted them to learn the proper skills necessary to move up the social scale.

One mother was quoted as saying: "I want my child to be aware that there's going to be somebody better than her. It's a hard thing to learn — it was for me — and I want her to start early." Another mother saved any prize winnings in a college fund for her daughter.

Parental aspirations

"I think there is a class issue," says Furedi. "In America it's seen as a white trailer-trash kind of thing and there's real contempt for that. But if you come from a middle-class background and shove your child into music lessons, that's OK. Parental aspiration acquires different forms but it's a very similar kind of impulse."

And given that we live in a world that increasingly values physical appearance, is there anything so very wrong in teaching one's children how to make the best of themselves, how to get ahead in life?

One mother interviewed for the BBC documentary puts it more succinctly when talking about her 6-year-old daughter competing in a pageant: "All the while I was pregnant I was [thinking] ‘Oh please let her be lovely, please let her be lovely,' because it does open more doors. I don't care what anyone says and I'm not saying I think this is right but there are surveys that actually state that prettier people will get more doors opened for them."

It might be depressing to think that our children are growing up in a world that places an ever greater value on appearance rather than substance but if it is the case, then child beauty pageants are, perhaps, a natural extension of the trend.

Back in Hampshire, Amber is putting away her collection of stones with great care. Each one has its own specific compartment in the pink rucksack so that she knows exactly where to find it. She hands me a tiny, smooth, toffee-brown pebble. "This one's my favourite," she says, turning it over in her hands. Why, I ask? Amber looks at me and then looks at the stone in the palm of her hand. "Because it's pretty," she says, and it seems like the most obvious answer in the world.