Page 3976 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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The Queensland Commissioner for Children’s website cites an Australian study which found that, by age seven, 71 per cent of girls want to be slimmer. An adolescent psychiatrist, Dr Sloane Madden, from Westmead Children’s Hospital said:
1/3 of 8 year olds are not happy with their weight and shape. Nearly 1 in 4 are dieting. I think there is a growing concern amongst eating disorder professionals around the world that children at this age are being subjected to increasingly sophisticated and adult messages. Messages equating thinness with success … presented to children at an age when really they’re psychologically unable to understand those images.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists say that eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness, with a death rate higher than that of major depression. The time, money and mental energy spent on conforming to sexual stereotypes is at the expense of other development opportunities.
There is a general harm that is additional to the specific physical, psychological and sexual harms related to sexualisation of children. For children and young people, especially girls, this is a real problem. And there is a vast quantity of material out there that explains the harms and the various ways this part of pop culture is damaging our children. Very large companies are making very large amounts of money out of it. And we have a responsibility to do all we can to reverse this problem.
What we need to do now, as a community, is work on the best way to productively address the issues. In particular, we really need to be looking at the curriculum framework for ACT schools. If we look at the chapter “The student manages self in relationships”, it does address some of the issues that have been raised today. There needs to be a more comprehensive approach. In particular, classes must provide the children with an opportunity to talk about their media consumption and how it informs their ideas about sex and the perceptions and expectations of themselves.
We need to make sure that we are giving our children the skills and confidence to break down the stereotypes to understand why people are presented in different ways and the commercial motivation behind the promotions.
On the creation of a voluntary code of conduct part of my motion, I am the first to recognise the limitations and difficulties. However, I do think it is a productive first step that will force retailers to consider an issue that perhaps they have never had to do before. It is an opportunity to help parents understand more about the issue and how it affects their children.
The Greens support the right to freedom of expression and think that censorship should be minimal. However, we also know that, as adults, our role is to safely guide children and young people through their exposure to life events and the development of their own free thinking.
We hear an age-old argument from industries that attempt to cast this issue as being about the right to freedom of speech. We are not talking about expressing political ideals or other values or beliefs. We are talking about objectifying women and
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