Bailey Review
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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