Who is watching out for the children?
29/07/2009 23:41 Filed in: general
Today, two ‘popular’ entertainers carried out a stunt, whereby a 14 year old girl was brought by her mother to their studio, hooked up to a lie detector, and quizzed on air by the radio hosts about her sexual history. The media coverage states that her mother, who attended, wanted to know whether her daughter had taken drugs or was sexually active.
While anyone with some standards has probably had a meltdown, those of us a bit closer to children at risk sighed. There are so many things wrong with this stunt, not the least of which is the ‘me, I didn’t do anything wrong’ online explanation from one of the entertainers (we’re not even going to link to any of the coverage, sorry).
‘What did you expect!’ you might ask?
Well, we expect that society will look out for children.
The girl was 14 years of age. In our country that is underage. So let’s see where the buck should have stopped.
We think it highly unlikely that the child was able to fully understand what she was getting herself into, and the full implications of what might occur. There’s informed consent and we doubt she had it. But maybe she wanted to go ahead?
So we think it was highly inappropriate for the mother to either coerce, acquiesce to or simply allow her underage daughter to be questioned on air about her sexual history. So mother hasn’t the best judgment?
We think is highly inappropriate for a commercial radio station to provide a forum for a careless parent to expose her underage child to such an experience.
Was there no adult there who questioned whether this was in the child’s best interests?
What is sad beyond belief is that not one adult considered the segment (because of the girl's age and the line of questioning) to be exploitative, damaging and negligent. Or if they did, they were prepared to compromise that for ratings and revenue.
When adults absolve themselves of responsibility for children, when commercial enterprises throw out standards in the pursuit of revenue, and when ignorant egotists rule the airwaves, the victims are the kids.
And sadly, this pattern of failure after failure is all too common. The question is not ‘who is responsible?’ It’s ‘who is going to take responsibility?’
While anyone with some standards has probably had a meltdown, those of us a bit closer to children at risk sighed. There are so many things wrong with this stunt, not the least of which is the ‘me, I didn’t do anything wrong’ online explanation from one of the entertainers (we’re not even going to link to any of the coverage, sorry).
‘What did you expect!’ you might ask?
Well, we expect that society will look out for children.
The girl was 14 years of age. In our country that is underage. So let’s see where the buck should have stopped.
We think it highly unlikely that the child was able to fully understand what she was getting herself into, and the full implications of what might occur. There’s informed consent and we doubt she had it. But maybe she wanted to go ahead?
So we think it was highly inappropriate for the mother to either coerce, acquiesce to or simply allow her underage daughter to be questioned on air about her sexual history. So mother hasn’t the best judgment?
We think is highly inappropriate for a commercial radio station to provide a forum for a careless parent to expose her underage child to such an experience.
Was there no adult there who questioned whether this was in the child’s best interests?
What is sad beyond belief is that not one adult considered the segment (because of the girl's age and the line of questioning) to be exploitative, damaging and negligent. Or if they did, they were prepared to compromise that for ratings and revenue.
When adults absolve themselves of responsibility for children, when commercial enterprises throw out standards in the pursuit of revenue, and when ignorant egotists rule the airwaves, the victims are the kids.
And sadly, this pattern of failure after failure is all too common. The question is not ‘who is responsible?’ It’s ‘who is going to take responsibility?’
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