Lads' mags in children's sight: the game is ON!

[RowanMumsnet]

After canvassing your views, we're extending Let Girls Be Girls to cover the issue of lads' mags on display where children can see them in newsagents, supermarkets, stationers and petrol stations. Have a look at our press release and survey results here. We're contacting all the major retailers to ask them to sign up, and will keep you posted about how that goes. If you'd like to cull some copy from the press release to compose your own letter to your local independent newsagent, please feel free, and post here to let us know what you've done.

Some of the retailers have asked us for examples of individual stores that are presenting problems, so if you've seen material inappropriately displayed in a specific branch, again, please post here and we'll pass the information on.

Cheers,

MNHQ

The Stun and link to No more porn on London Transport

You might have to increase the size of the image to get the full brilliant effect of the spoof paper.

There is a petition on this started by a Plymouth mum of two, and you can sign it online.

There is also a website where you can report a shop.

Thank you so much for this campaign - the co-op in rarnborough hamppshire puts the star and other newspapers with virtually naked girls on the front on the bottom shelf. A couple of times I have asked them about it bit they are not bothered - and the co-op claims to have an ethical edge!

Also garages, especially BP and Total in Farnborough have lewd pictures on thefront of newspapers at child's eye view. Highly offensive and damaging to the self esteem of my girls and their brother's perspective on women.

The co op in West Kensington has them placed very low down.

Talk to the Co-op, their board have agreed that they do not want lads mags on display for children. In fact I went ot mine last night and couldn't see any mags, it took about 90 seconds and they were tucked behind mens health.

Don't these magazines get most of their revenue from advertising? In which case might it be worth contacting the companies whose products they advertise?

The decision about where to place the ad would have been taken by an advertising agency who aren't going to care about these issues. But if you complain to the actual company they might start to see it as a "reputational risk" (especially if the campaign has been getting a lot of publicity)

Thanks Mumsnet!! I really hope this is a huge success.

What do you think about the idea of involving schools? Imagine the impact of heads(plus parents) writing to all local shops who display this material...(excited emoticon)

I support this campaign. There is no need to have these magazines on display.

Could we include "rude" greetings cards in this campaign? In our local Post Office, there is a stand of those crude "humorous" cards right where you have to queue for the counter. Although I am sure people would argue that they are harmless fun for adults, they need to recognise that despite the news reports on failures in Literacy, there are still some children who can read at a young age, and the "f" word is fairly easy for them to sound out phonetically (as is boobs, sex, etc etc).

Needless to say, I wholeheartedly support the campaign.

Aha - glad to see some more posts, lest it fall into the doldrums!

Incidentally, saw Claire Perry MP on about trying to get customers of ISPs to "opt in" to being able to see 'adult' web sites on Panorama. Idea is unworkable for technical reasons (how do you monitor content of millions of websites, billions of pages), but someone has suggested she be on a webchat on this thread.

The Panorama programme was "Too Much Too Young" and definitely worth watching if you have teens (or younger) and is on BBC iPlayer (but was 20:30 on Monday 10.01.11 so won't be on there much after 18:00 tonight, I assume)

Complained in Co-op local today about GQ magazine promo at my 3 year old height with fully naked woman on the front. Soooo angry! They said they don't choose the scheme and have also raised their concerns about it. Who designs these schemes? This is a no-brainer surely?

OK so I have signed the "FRONT PAGE" campaign about this issue at www.thefrontpagecampaign.org.uk/Petition.aspx
but i just won't feel any better until this ridiculous kind of advertising is changed. It's easy to add to face book etc so I recommend it highly.

This campaign looks like it has gone into limbo.

Wonder if there is anyone at MNHQ who can say what action is being taken behind the scenes (or if not giving any details, at least confirm something is being done), please !

From my post of 16.12.2010

Perhaps Rowan / team at MNHQ could come up with a briefly worded piece as a reason for this campaign to "have legs" and submit it via the Suggest a Campaign page on 38Degrees.

38Degrees has an e-mail submission facility so a user can identify their location (and thus their MP) and then get a pre-written e-mail (which they are then encouraged to edit, so they can add examples from their own locality), and then submit.

It means that the general sentiment will be the same from potentially thousands of people but tailored to specifics from their lives.

Clearly there's no point reinventing the wheel, so the first step would be to get 38Degrees to adopt this as a campaign.

Once that's done, it would surely just need a mention in the MN newsletter and in some topic areas, to make MN users aware of this e-mail facility, so they could put forward to their MPs the widely held views that there's no need for these mags to be made as visible as they are.

"Modesty covers" (sealed plastic bags with slogans overing photos) on all of them would mean a standard method of dealing with them could be requested, so whatever shelf they ended up on, they should cause less offence.

It does not go to the level of banning them completely which some may argue for, but surely it would be a 'reasonable' first step, and would mean any obnoxious newsagent would have the bags already in place so despite placing them on unsuitable shelves, would have 'lost that battle' with parents who dislike the smut being visible.

Further on the "modesty covers" for lads mags, having seen this post by
Baileysismyfriend on 28-Jul-10

"I was in a petrol station the other day and all it sold was dirty magazines - well apart from petrol obviously - they were all at child's eye level too, awful."

it struck me that if the the Government wanted to, it could force all magazines of the "boobs and bums" variety (whether "lads' mags" or stronger) to have plastic covers over them, leaving only the names of the magazine and barcode/price portion visible.

That would in effect class the "lads' mags" in with porn, and make the shelves of newsagents, petrol station shops and so on a mass of grey plastic covers. There would be no 'dirty old men' (or young, for that matter) loitering to view the mags like they are in a library, there'd be little or nothing on show to offend Baileysismyfriend or for her daughter to see.

I know it is short of a complete ban, which would be in the minds of many, but it would take away much of the immediate offense that is felt right now, because of such mags being visible. Wonder if they could force the same on the Daily Sport and the Star, too ?

Thoughts, anyone ?

The 'sign our petition' page is very hard to read (white text on light grey??)

Here's a link to the homepage instead:

www.thefrontpagecampaign.org.uk/Home.aspx

Hi all,

Just to confirm, the wheels are in motion on this one and we expect to be announcing something by the end of this week.

MNHQ x

Thanks from the update Rowan. Cannot wait to see what happens.

Will you give any thought towards getting all the mags and the trash 'news' papers to be forced to have 'modesty covers' so they are barred from showing bare flesh (some currently have blobs to prevent the display of nipples, but let's face it, there are lots lots of bottoms and boobs being shown, at newsagents with the soft porn end such as Razzle and so on, and one complaint is about inappropriate shelving where these are not 'top shelf' because some shops have so many different mags, for gay and straight men, predominantly).

While some of the trash-papers take delight in 'up skirt' views where there is little left to the imagination if a leggy young woman bends at the hip to check the strap on a shoe, for example, these are perhaps more 'sensationalist' than the lads mags which might have some bareness inside and slightly less provocative covers these days than those 'papers'.

So where was the announcement, please?

I've looked at a few of the threads until I am getting splinters from scratching my head as I see nothing new is being posted. Not much seems to have changed... or am I missing something "obvious" perhaps?

W H Smith have decided to abandon the top shelf and put Lads Mags back on normal display.

Trying to justify it now of BBC Radio 5live

Daily Mail feature

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1359697/Top-stores-agree-hide-lads-mags-children-WHSmith-refuse.html

Apologies NetworkGuy and others - meant to post this yesterday but had a half-term fail.

Let us know what you think!

If you're interested the feminsit group OBJECT are doing a 'Feminist Friday' protest today against WH Smith, details on the UK Feminista website:

www.ukfeminista.org.uk/events/all-events/2-local-event/315-london-feminist-friday.html

(this is a link to the London event but there nmay be others around the country - check with the organiser)

Where I am, Asda has had them on top shelf with covering so only the titles can be seen if you are tall enough... Have not looked in Tesco recently.