Braving the Bratz and pester power

by Jane Still

As the mother of five girls between the ages of three and 17, I’ve had my share of fighting over when is the appropriate age for make up, for bras, and for copying the women in the music videos who gyrate like pole dancers. (The answers are, in order: “when you can pay for it”, “when you’ve got something to put in it”, and “over my dead body”.)

So it was with great interest that I settled down to watch the unsettling discussion Bratz, Bras and Tweens that aired on Insight (SBS) last month. The program explored whether ‘tweens’ – children between 6-12 years of age – are suffering from a surfeit of sexualised imageries and aggressive marketing. With up to $50 a week spending money and “pester power” behind them, tweens are an attractive demographic for advertisers. Bratz dolls, Paris Hilton, bras for toddlers, and photo-shoots featuring Lolita-like lovelies sucking lollipops – highly sexualised advertising and products aimed at children are inescapable.

Parental and community concerns about marketing to children and exposing them to sexual images have led to campaigns such as that formed by Melbourne mother Julie Gale, Kids Free to be Kids. The wide-eyed advertising industry representatives on the discussion panel however say this is misdirected moral panic. Accusations of “corporate paedophilia,” made by the Australia Institute last year, are unfounded and counter productive, they say.

Lesley Brydon from the Advertising Federation of Australia says that there are already regulations about advertising. “Advertisers are just reflecting community standards,” she says.

Duncan Fine, author of Why TV is good for kids draws a strong reaction from the studio audience when he goes one step further and says that parents should embrace marketing and simply explain to their children what they’re seeing. The Taliban in Afghanistan allowed no advertising or sexual imagery, he said: “Ask the little girls how safe they felt there.”

Against this rhetoric is pitted a growing and disturbing body of evidence that it’s not simply parents’ sensibilities and wallets suffering under the onslaught of sexual imagery. Joe Tucci, CEO of the Australian Childhood Foundation, talks about his work with children under the age of 11 who exhibit inappropriate sexual behaviour. About half of the children he deals with have been abused, he says, but many of the others have not, and they and their parents report on the bombardment of sexual images as impacting significantly on their dysfunction.

Eileen Zurbriggen, a member of the American Psychiatric Association task force which put together a large number of studies to assess the effects of sexual imagery on young people, says their research showed significant impacts on mental health.

“We were dismayed to find how many negative consequences were associated with sexualising images and products,” she says, “such as greater risk of depression, low self esteem and eating disorders.”
Children’s advocates believe that marketing to under-twelves and explicit advertising on billboards should simply be illegal. It’s not fair, says Clive Hamilton of the Australian Institute, to expect parents to be eternally vigilant or compelled to engage in developmentally inappropriate conversations with their children.

Surely there must be a middle ground between Duncan Fine’s free market free-for-all, and adopting a completely advertising free zone for children. (Which parent, after all, hasn’t sat their child down in December with the K-Mart catalogues and said, “Write your list for Santa”?)

What all involved in the debate agree on is that all adults have a responsibility towards children. While parents should be supported in protecting their kids, they should also take some responsibility for the over-sexualised community in which we live. The advertising industry in turn should be required to take children’s developmental stages seriously.

Perhaps parents like Samantha - who says she doesn’t like Bratz dolls, so she only allows six year old Arielle to have two of them – should learn to ignore that pester power, and say “over my dead body” a little more often. Surely the best way to convince corporations and advertising gurus that their campaigns are distasteful is not to buy their products.