Comments on: Duncan Fine: No evidence media images cause child abuse

By: Heathdon McGregor

Heathdon McGregor — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:19:38 +0000

I thought that the problem was that dj”s or the ad company had written instructions to make the kids look sexy. This is the problem. Not what happens after the image leaves their control, what they had planned for the image. If these kids of goebbels want to blame everybody else when it is writing in memos that their intention was to sexualise these kids then why did they go to court to have it kept secret.

Guilty conscience perhaps.

I don’t know if im right please explain to me how I am wrong

By: Dermot McGuire

Dermot McGuire — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:04:58 +0000

Asexual childhood unglate? No such thing has ever existed. What children should haveif possble is feelings appropriate to their age free from adult influence. In either direction.

By: kimba

kimba — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:58:33 +0000

I have mixed feelings on this issue - as you could expect, given that I’m both a parent and I have the misfortune to be attracted to girls as well as women.

Duncan Fine was spot on: if I see a young girl as sexy, the problem’s with me, not the advertising agency. It’s her youthfulness that appeals and making her look more adult doesn’t necessarily make her a pervert’s delight.

But there might be something in Clive Hamilton’s arguments and it took Crikey readers to help me see it. Ungulate points out that the issue is “that kids aged 10 should not be worried about how ‘sexy’ they are”. Well, why didn’t Hamilton say so? What’s with the alarmist use of terms like “corporate pedophilia”?

As a parent, I don’t want my kids to feel pressured to become sexually aware - they should discover their sexuality at their own pace. If advertising is contributing to such peer pressure (rather than just following a trend), then it will take reasoned argument to cause change. Someone needs to say “discovering one’s sexual identitiy is a normal part of growing up, but we need measures to limit pressure and ensure kids can grow up at their own pace”. The alarmism is not helping.

By: stephen martin

stephen martin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:22:25 +0000

Ungulate you more or less took the words out of my mouth. It is not that portraying children in “sexy” clothing affect only deviants, it is more to do with encouraging the models to be sexually precocious; let’s not go down the US model of child beauty pageants.

By: Ungulate

Ungulate — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:50:13 +0000

Weak.

The issue that Gale and Hamilton have nailed is not that these images will “arouse” deviants, it’s that kids aged 10 should not be worried about how “sexy” they are. They should be enjoying an asexual childhood. Another salient point the 2006 Australia Institute report raised about the images in advertising material was that boys in the same age bracket are quite blatantly portrayed in a far less “adult and sexy” poses than the girls.