No doubt pressured by the likes of the Daily Mail, six months ago the UK government launched a review into the "Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood". Oh yes. It was led by a chap called Reg Bailey, who's the Chief Executive of Mothers' Union. The organisation then criticised the report for "not going far enough" in its recommendations. Ho hum.
The recommendations include:
- Providing parents with one single website to make it easier to complain about any programme, advert, product or service.
- Putting age restrictions on music videos to prevent children buying sexually explicit videos and guide broadcasters over when to show them.
- Covering up sexualised images on the front pages of magazines and newspapers so they are not in easy sight of children.
- Making it easier for parents to block adult and age-restricted material from the internet by giving every customer a choice at the point of purchase over whether they want adult content on their home internet, laptops or smart phones.
- Retailers offering age-appropriate clothes for children — the retail industry should sign up to the British Retail Consortium’s new guidelines which checks and challenges the design, buying, display and marketing of clothes, products and services for children.
- Restricting outdoor adverts containing sexualised imagery where large numbers of children are likely to see them, for example near schools, nurseries and playgrounds.
- Giving greater weight to the views of parents in the regulation of pre-watershed TV, rather than viewers as a whole, about what is suitable for children to watch.
- Banning the employment of children under 16 as brand ambassadors and in peer-to-peer marketing, and improving parents’ awareness of advertising and marketing techniques aimed at children.
The bit about clothes may be due to a fuss that the tabloids created a few months ago about a store selling padded bras sized to fit eight year olds. No doubt fearful of a consumer backlash, they quickly stopped stocking them.
And the evidence basis for his report? Surveys of a couple of hundred people. Even more worryingly, many recommendations are based on a minority viewpoint. There is also no definition of terms such as "sexual image" - so does it include the front cover of magazines like Men's Health, which show muscular, topless blokes? Some more liberal critics have said that rather than evidence-based policy making, the report could potentially be an example of policy-based evidence making...
Anyway, if you're sufficiently interested to read more, find it on the Department for Education website
Comments
I found it odd
that the Mother's Union should have a man as CEO - couldn't they find a suitably qualified mother?
Remember that the MU has strong links to the church, so it's probably full of people like Anne Atkins (Daily Wail, journo).
Angharad
Angharad
Most of the recommendations above
Most of the recommendations above would end up unfairly restricting the rights of adults with no discernible benefit to children. No one has ever done a study that shows that leaving Playboy or other publications out where children can see them has any affect whatsoever. The magazines may be morally suspect for other reasons but so are these restrictions.
This is the kind of thing going on that keeps BC, which has no porno on site, from being able to use PayPal or Google ads because those companies bend over backward to comply with insane restrictions that have no benefit to anyone except a few bigots who get to look smug that they have deprived someone somewhere of some benefit of freedom.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Meh.
Perhaps I'm being cynical but given the blue half of the Coalition's love of self-regulation, voluntary guidelines and light touch regulation most of it will be so watered down as to have no impact in the end. However, I do wonder when someone is going to point out to the (surprisingly patriarchially led!) Mother's Union that its not the 8 year olds that have the buying power to purchase all these sexualised childrens clothes but their mothers (who could destroy the market for such garments in an instant buy not purchasing them for their kids) and maybe the MU should get their own house in order first... ;-)
"Just once I want my life to be like an 80's movie, preferably one with a really awesome musical number for no apparent reason. But no, no, John Hughes did not direct my life."
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
It worries me
me as to what is defined as 'Adult and or pornographic,.
During my last two years when I was working, the company, (A large british Corporation,)allowed it's staff to use the internet for private purposes outside of office hours. This meant that night shift workers who just manned communication centres were quite legitimately allowed to access shoppping sites, sports sites etc but NO 'adult sites' when work loads were slack during meal times and low tides when ships were not moving.
The problem was who defined 'adult' or 'porn'?
Quite legitimate transgendered sites were lumped in with raw porn sites and a 'net nanny' classed such sites as BC as Porn. I know because BC and Fictionmania were deemed pornographic and entry was proscribed.
To circumvent these rules most staff, including me, took our own laptops and dongles to work and used them when times were legitimately slack.
I never met one of the so called arbiters but you can bet they were 'corporate people' or 'media mummies' who probably deemed everything to do with LGBT as pornographic
The problem is, many trans children find out much of their first information on the internet and learn there is support and compassion out there, sometimes outside of any abuse they might be suffering in the home.
The internet and TE GEE sites are a lifeline for Tee kids and, while some parents might consider a Tee site to be acceptable material if and or when their child begins to realise their situation, there are still many parents who will not!
Who shall arbitarily determine whether a Tee site is legitimate or porn?
There is still a lot of homophobia and transphobia out there.
Beverly.
Growing old disgracefully.
Bunch of bigots
well, they're the conservative crowd, who think that banning things means you're conservative. The problem is that these idiots have an unbelievable support in politics. I remember the school shootings here in germany: In the consequence they wanted to ban egoshooter games. Although it was an obvious case of a bullied kid who had access to firearms. Crap like that would happen even more often if we had the same kind of access to weapons as americans, because in germany teachers only care about bullying if it is physical.
They are scared by stuff they can't control and try to do so via child protection. While I wouldn't show porn to children, I don't know why it should do damage. They just don't understand it and might ask inconvienient questions to their parents.
But what do you expect of a bunch of conservative and/or religious bigots? Argh... naked skin, cover it up!
We can only hope these idiots won't get their policy.
Beyogi
Porn
There are all sorts of reasons porn should be restricted, one of the main ones being how it distorts what people might expect of a relationship. Rape, for example, is fine, if you press the right 'buttons'. It doesn't celebrate bare skin, it turns it into a commodity.
The eight-year-old's bras were padded, and that to me is sinister. There are many children I see being dressed as miniature adults, including in high heels. Shoes like that are not only wildly inappropriate for children, but actively damaging to growing bones.
Now, I am wearing, right now, a pair of suede court shoes with a three and a half inch heel. I am wearing them because they are pretty, and I am an elderly adult. If I had a little girl here, and she wanted to play dress-up, like Ang's Trish, it would be sweet to see her slopping around in them. Seeing the same child out in a pair made to fit her, that is wrong.
What has happened is that children have become a market rather than a delight. I would hazard a guess that the people driving children into sexuality at ever lower ages, so they can be sold things, are actually the same people who form the current UK government. Hypocrisy? What else?
I agree
I can agree with you, but that doesn't change the fact that child protection is mostly used as a convenient excuse to ban stuff the conservative establishment doesn't like.
Public outrage against stuff like the padded bras for eight year old kids is a good thing, but making laws against stuff like this is bad. The more laws are made the less they're followed.
Nobody needs laws to regulate liking. And imho this is happening here. Driving children into sexuality is rather pointless as long as they're asexuell and prepubescent.
That is adult stupidity and should be treaded as such. Making laws banning children to wear stuff like that or shops selling it won't help. They should rather teach parents what not to do with their children then going out of their way to ban stuff.
Excuse my disagreeing
"Driving children into sexuality is rather pointless as long as they're asexuell and prepubescent."
If you can say that with a straight face then you are obviously ignorant about the true nature of child molesters. Asexual and prepubescent are precisely the qualities many child molesters look for. This allows their warped imaginations to run wild with the possibilities. I speak from experience here, I was molested by a close family friend for over two years, starting at the age of seven. Thankfully, this was in the pre-internet days, child molesters such as he had to make due with Polaroid snaps. But taking a lot of shots still enabled him to trade shots with like-minded people. How many of those snaps survived to be scanned into computers is anybody's guess, and one of my major fears.
I'm not sure about the laws suggested. Many times their side effects are worse than the problem they're intended to fix. Case in point: Oklahoma law forbidding child molesters (and other registered sex offenders) from living within x number of feet of schools, parks, day care facilities, etc. means there are very few places these people can live within a metro area such as Oklahoma City. The result is they either cluster in one of the few areas they are legally allowed to live (itself illegal), they move to a more rural area, where they can't get work and end up on welfare or stealing to get money to survive, or they go "off the map" - not registering where they are living (also required by law). That means instead of the child molester living down the street that you know about 'cause he is registered, you could end up with one right next door to you that's not registered.
So I tend to agree that passing 'feel-good' laws is a bad idea, passing well thought out legislation that considers side effects and such needs to be done.
BTW, the appearance of indifference on the part of the liberal establishment to these crimes against minors, coupled with the defense of them by liberal groups (ACLU, for example) is what drives people like me into the more conservative camp. Not my favorite environment, by any means, but the conservatives are at least trying to do something, even if it is misguided.
* * *
"Girls are like pianos, when they're not upright they're grand!" Benny Hill
Karen J.
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Having a similar childhood history as yours...
...I must add my voice to what you already said just in that I could not agree with you more strongly. Thank you, Karen.
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
Sorry, that was not what I meant.
First I'm sorry for your experience... I didn't even think about stuff like this. I figured it would be rather pointless to try to sexualize kids who are prepubescent. Their peers won't really get it and for everyone else it is pretty disgusting. Except perhaps for child molesters, but them... eww... Well sorry that I forgot that stuff like that happens too. I just saw this in the context of parents using their childrens as dress up dolls for improper clothing.
I'm from germany, so I don't know how it exactly works in america. The major problem with every anti child-molesting and anti childponography legislation in the last years was that they never really thought about the consequences. It does no good to make laws nobody can enforce or laws that criminalize teenagers having sex or laws that make stories describing teenagers having sex into child pornography. Reading those can be punished by up to two years prison sentence.
They even wanted to introduce web filters, to stop people from looking at child pornography sites. Well, it's not like you can't avoid DNS filters... And there were public demands to escalate them to illegal gambling sites (every gambling not hosted by the government is illegal in germany) and other stuff.
In the end I wondered if the reason why they were installing those filters in the first place were those additional issues and the child pornography was only the smokescreen.
I'm very wary towards feel good laws now. They generally don't do what they're supposed to do and do more damage than they can ever do good. In germany a conservative crying for child protection means that he or she wants to forbid adult people thing they ought to be allowed to do. I'm not talking about child pornography, the laws are very strict, the enforcement is the problem, but I'm talking about violent computergames aka killergames (egoshooter, 1.person shooter, everything were something humanoid ends up dead) or normal pornography.
I'm sorry if you thought I wanted to trivialise child molesting. That is definitly not the case. I just wanted to make a statement that I think it is utterly shitty that politicians use child protection as a smokescreen to cover their real purposes. If they want to introduce a thought police then they have to say that and not doing it via "child protection". It wasn't my intention to bring back bad memories...I guess I phrased it unluckily, but I hope I could clarify what I meant.
It's WORSE than that...
Some PARENTS are pushing this! You say, No? I've seen AND heard it. :-(
Anne
Pornography and restrictions
Hi Ben,
The main problem with legislating AGAINST anything that thas even a moderate following, is that it causes the price of the thing to go up as it drives the procurement/supply of the thing 'underground'. All the while, the popularity of this 'whatever' is actually increased through the 'forbidden fruit' syndrome. The USA found this out with prohibition of alcohol in the early to middle 20th century.
I personally feel VERY strongly AGAINST exploitation of minors (especially) and anyone else in the production of pornography, but on the other hand I quite like to look at tastefully produced pictures of women with little or no clothing on. I have a two facetted liking for these photos, both desiring to look like the women depicted and desiring them. I do not think I'm all that unusual on this site, but then we here are a small minority of the general public.
No legislation can EVER change the minds or desires of people, which will ALWAYS provide a ready market for perveyors of pornography. Perhaps oversight by an approved agency could help ensure that the rights and financial restitution for the models would be fairly met?
Just my thoughts, for what they are worth. (Not much in the overall scheme of things.)
with love,
Hope
with love,
HER
Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.
Wow - I can reply to my own post
Hey Me,
I (the first me/I/myself) used the word "tasteful*". I (the second me/I/myself) think that that word is the key to the WHOLE pornography issue. There are some 7 BILLION people on this planet and I (either of the mes/Is/myselves) doubt that any two of them has EXACTLY the same likes and dislikes. Therefore "taste" is unique to each of us. We can be enticed to appreciate something but can not be forced into any certain liking or disliking. One person's pornography is the next person's art. In my (again either of the me/I/myself) opinion, again, it is more important to protect and compensate the model than to try to stop production of something that could NEVER be stopped anyway.
with love,
Hope
with love,
HER
Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.
Bailey Review
A case of the government trying to regulate common sense, it seems.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
Stan
I don't see crimes against minors (such as sexual molestation and rape) to be "common sense". At least some effort is being made, but it needs to be better thought out.
* * *
"Girls are like pianos, when they're not upright they're grand!" Benny Hill
Karen J.
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb