Webchat with Reg Bailey, author of the government report on sexualisation of children, Friday 10th June, 11am to 12pm

[KatieMumsnet]

Reg Bailey, chief executive of the Mothers' Union and author of the government?s Let Children be Children, is joining us for a webchat this Friday, 10 June, 11am to 12pm.

Following our Let Girls be Girls campaign , launched early in 2010, we?ve been asking retailers to commit not to sell products which play upon, emphasise or exploit their sexuality.

The government has now responded to our campaign and Reg Bailey?s report, which included these recommendations:

? Retailers to ensure magazines with sexualised images have modesty sleeves.

? Music videos to be sold with age ratings.

? Procedures to make it easier for parents to block adult and age restricted material on internet.

? Code of practice to be issued on child retailing.

? Create a single website for parents to complain to regulators.

? Change rules on nine o'clock television watershed to give priority to views of parents.

Please join us live to ask Reg about the report, or if you can't make it, please post your question here.

exactly!

@weeonion

Reg - good to see you here!

I wondered how you might see the sexualisation of children in the media (as only one avenue) as contravening articles 17 and 34 of the Rights of the Child/ This also underminines ALL of our roles in this culture around child protection which means we have a clear remit to prevent abuse and exploitation in both contact and non contact ways?

Hi weeonion,

I think I see the sexualisation of children as an artificial distinction, albeit that it was in the terms of reference that I was given, as sexualisation of our society clearly affects adults too. I don't think we should erect barriers between age groups in order to protect the young. I think we need to address the issue of what is healthy for adults and children alike so that excess is recognised for what it is and we're transparent about the outcomes for all of us. My aspiration is that we create a truly family-friendly society for everyone, and this is just one part of how we do that. It seems to me that parents want to take the lead and we should encourage that. No responsible parent would want to see any article of the Rights of the Child contravened. Anything we can do has got to support the wellbeing of children.

@weeonion

What is Mr Bailey's response to parents who are concerned that the review does not go far enough in making links across to hypersexualised behaviour and violence against women. The review does little to address the need for more effective evidence based sexual health, wellbeing and relationship education and is being used already as a means to call for less of this type of effective education, instead of more.

I can see there are a lot of concerns among mumsnetters that my review does not go far enough. But I was given a clear remit to listen to parents concerns about the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood, and so my recommendations are based on what parents told me were their biggest concerns. I want to empower parents to deal with this tricky area. I want to remove the barriers that you as parents say are getting in the way of bringing up your children. I have not made recommendations about how parents should bring up their children as that is not my job.

Thanks for answering.

Thank you takethatlady for expressing it so elequently. What bothered me when reading the report was the emphasis on "decency" which, when delivered by a Christian women's organisation with a male head, somewhat muddies the message.

Reg, why do you think David Cameron ditched the really amazingly brilliant review which Dr Linda Papadoppolus conducted into the sexualisation of children? This review was much more wide reaching and linked into violence against women and girlsather than picking out "easier" aspects which I feel your review has done.

My thoughts on the reason? David Cameron wanted to put his stamp on it and do something "easy". Really your report contains no new radical suggestions which were not going to get there anyway via eg Mumsnet and just general press coverage of this topic.

Reg, are you a feminist. Do you understand feminism? How can the girls of today aspire to achieve in their careers when they see the head of an organisation called the mothers's union being headed by someone who is not a mother?!

This issue is not as simple as the odd T-shirt - it is about the fact that girls and women are not treated equally in our society!

My local coop has had on display all week a Sunday Sport with a front cover which is a shot up someone's skirt showing a white thong. .

Shame on the coop and shame on companies/media society who desperately need more women in positions of power who would sought this out.

Isn't this fundamentally stupid and flawed report just taking us back towards the dark ages when women weren't allowed any kind of sexual expression of their own? 'Protecting innocence' in Victorian terms was usually about making sure that the young and vulnerable were not able to articulate that they were being abused by all these upright Christian men, and making sure that they would either be disbelieved if they spoke about it, or blamed for having brought the abuse on themselves.

@shakira123

I would like to agree with and ask the same question as Rhoobarb, why did the review whilst good in itself and is tackling the sexualisation of children through their clothes etc, why did it not look at the increasing sexualisation of children in schools, often without parents knowledge.

You can censor tv programmes, tone down music videos and parents have the choice and control not to let their children watch this at home yet as parents we have little control over the extremely explicit videos being shown in some Primary schools to children as young as 7.

What my children may or may not see on a Saturday night (Nicole Sherzinger on last weeks BGT being extremely sexual, and the lyrics of her song also) pales into insignificance against the video of penetration being used in my childs school at age 9.

Why did the review not incorporate looking at this important area and will it at any time be considered?

I was specifically asked to look at commercialisation and sexualisation and that wouldn't have included sex education in schools.

I am really sympathetic with parents who feel that this area is out of their control, as I think everything I've heard from parents is that they want to be responsible for their children. My review is a start in giving parents more power in this important area.

Let's hope it continues.

forkful, I suspect that the reason Cameron replaced Papadoppolus with Reg, was because he's not actually serious about this issue. He wants to nod to the Daily Mail and pretend he's doing something, without actually doing something. He knows perfectly well that you can't tackle this issue without tackling the wider issue of women's status in society and we all know the Tory Party's attitude to women.

HTH.

There does seem to be a lot of emphasis on polling parents (in the report's methods) and 'empowering' parents, in its recommendations. By parallel with sale of junk food and alcohol, wouldn't a expertise/research-based approach (like the Papadoppolus one) have been a better one, and wouldn't an emphasis on preventing damaging commercial pressures, rather than adding new and unnecessary strategies of parental complaint have been a better outcome?

thanks reg

Agrees HerbeX, especially as they are getting a little more obvious about it

@forkful

Reg, why do you think David Cameron ditched the really amazingly brilliant review which Dr Linda Papadoppolus conducted into the sexualisation of children? This review was much more wide reaching and linked into violence against women and girlsather than picking out "easier" aspects which I feel your review has done.

My thoughts on the reason? David Cameron wanted to put his stamp on it and do something "easy". Really your report contains no new radical suggestions which were not going to get there anyway via eg Mumsnet and just general press coverage of this topic.

Reg, are you a feminist. Do you understand feminism? How can the girls of today aspire to achieve in their careers when they see the head of an organisation called the mothers's union being headed by someone who is not a mother?!

This issue is not as simple as the odd T-shirt - it is about the fact that girls and women are not treated equally in our society!

My local coop has had on display all week a Sunday Sport with a front cover which is a shot up someone's skirt showing a white thong. .

Shame on the coop and shame on companies/media society who desperately need more women in positions of power who would sought this out.

I know that David Cameron thought a lot of Linda P's report, but it only dealt with the sexualisation of women and girls, and the links into violence. I was asked to go further and look at commercial pressures as well and the relationship between the two. But I had meetings with Linda P and built on the great work she'd already done. I don't think my review comes up with any easy answers, because tackling the problem is not easy, and can't be achieved in just one report.

If the recommendations that I've made are enacted to the spirit, rather than the letter, we will make a start in tackling these issues. "Am I a feminist?" You can't work for an organisation like Mothers' Union and not recognise that right round the world, women and girls get a lousy deal. I spent yesterday afternoon dealing with members of my team from the DR Congo, where 400,000 women and girls have been raped as a weapon of war in the last 12 months. That's 48 victims per hour. It makes me really angry as a human being that that behaviour continues, and it's not just in the Congo.

Equal opps do work the other way round, and I am the first man as CEO in 135 years of the organisation's existence. Mothers' Union is a misleading title, because you can be a man or a woman, married, single, divorced, with, or without children, all you need to do is care passionately about families.

Finally, turning from there to the Sunday Sport, my recommendation 1 would stop that being on display, and it seems to me that if they can't display it, their sales should eventually fall, and that should be a good way to prevent that sort of abuse in the media.

Hasn't the ssport gone out of business? One bright ray on the horizon...

I've got a question or two for Reg to which I really would like an answer.

By my count, a little over 2000 people provided opinions towards the report either through the DoE website or via the TNS Omnibus survey.

Of those, only 134 indicated concerns over the positioning of Lad's Mags in retail outlets, but this led to recommendation that these titles - of which there are perhaps 5 or 6 in the market account for around 600,000 sales a month - should be either top-shelved or sold only in 'modesty sleeves'. These responses all came from the write-in survey on the DoE website, i.e. a from non-representative, self-selecting group.

In the TNS survey, which is a nationally representative, weighted opinion poll of parents, 47% cited pictures in magazines and newspaper as encouraging children to act older than they are and 57% cited these pictures as putting pressure on children to conform to a particular body shape and size. For both questions, the top 'offender' was identified as 'celebrity culture' (58% and 65%) and, of course, newspapers and magazine are just about the most prolific celebrity in the UK, particularly when comes to the websites of tabloid and mid-market newspapers, i.e. The Sun and, particularly, The Daily Mail.

The Sun and Daily Mail have combined daily sales of around 6 million copies and attract a similar number of visitors to their websites every day. The big three celebrity magazines (Hello, Ok and Star) shift around 1.3 copies per issue. Northern and Shell's 'women's weeklies' have combined sales of over 1.3 million copies a week and many of these trade heavily on celebrity stories and on extremely prurient 'true life' stories of incest, sexual infidelity, sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Your reponse to these concerns in the report consists of just two paragraphs - one which explains that the Press Complaints Commission is as much use as a chocolate teapot while other describes the organisation which is supposed to self regulate teen magazines as a 'toothless watchdog' - and has nothing whatsoever to offer by any recommendations addressing what, from the TNS suvery, is much larger and more widespread area of concern.

Would you care to account for the very obvious anomalies in that position and explain why what seems to be a very major area of concern for parents who participated in your review was simply blown off with a couple of paragraphs that amount to 'Not my problem, Guv'?

Dame the lack of an edit button - Hello, Ok and Star have, of course, combined sales of 1.3 million copies per issue.

I too think that children are far more likely to be upset and alarmed by the 'Hubby raped my mother, our babies and the family hamster' proleporn mags than by Rihanna flashing her knickers briefly on TV.

@Catmilk

ANOTHER QUESTION FOR REG BAILEY When you included the phrase 'The world is a nasty place' in a supposedly important review for the government, did it not make you suspect, if just for a moment, that you were woefully unqualified for this task?

The phrase I used that in was characterising one of the approaches that I was hearing about relating to the commercialisation and the sexualisation of children. It was said in the context that we should perhaps wrap children up in cotton wool until they reached, say, the age of 18, and then they could fend for themselves. The other approach I heard was that the world was still a nasty place, but all you needed to do was to teach children "media literacy". I don't think either approach works. The "cotton wool" approach seems to be beloved of certain media, and the "media literacy" approach, which assumes young people are "media savvy" seems to deny that anyone could be hurt by what parents recognise is an increasingly sexualised world.

One young person I spoke to showed great maturity as a response to this second approach in telling me that she'd learned in biology that if she stepped on a pin, one part of her nervous system sent a signal to her brain and another part of the nervous system sent a signal back to contract a muscle in her leg so that she moved her foot off the pin. But, she said, I know that, but it still hurts. I can see an ad with an impossibly-shaped model in it, and I know it's been airbrushed to make her look size zero and with an impeccable complexion, but it still makes me feel bad about myself.

So even if I may be unqualified for the task, I feel so passionate about the future of our children, I undertook to learn whatever I needed to do to do the job properly. I now know who Katy Perry is...

prurient is the exact word unity- mainstream media is full of prurient detail, even BBC news.

@Threadworm8

There does seem to be a lot of emphasis on polling parents (in the report's methods) and 'empowering' parents, in its recommendations. By parallel with sale of junk food and alcohol, wouldn't a expertise/research-based approach (like the Papadoppolus one) have been a better one, and wouldn't an emphasis on preventing damaging commercial pressures, rather than adding new and unnecessary strategies of parental complaint have been a better outcome?

My review was building on previous reviews in this area and I therefore took account of previous expertise and academic research by Professor Buckingham, and Linda P among others. But it was most important to get to the heart of what parents were most worried about. I hope my recommendations will prevent damaging commercial pressures on children. Actions like tighter guidelines on the clothes and products that are sold to children, and preventing children's exposure to over-sexualised music videos and billboards should start to limit the sexual and commercial pressures on children.

Instead of "Modesty Covers" (ugh, what a coy term) could you not recommend the lads mags etc covers are emblazoned with "THIS PUBLICATION OBJECTIFIES WOMEN" In large, friendly letters?

@UnityMot

I've got a question or two for Reg to which I really would like an answer.

By my count, a little over 2000 people provided opinions towards the report either through the DoE website or via the TNS Omnibus survey.

Of those, only 134 indicated concerns over the positioning of Lad's Mags in retail outlets, but this led to recommendation that these titles - of which there are perhaps 5 or 6 in the market account for around 600,000 sales a month - should be either top-shelved or sold only in 'modesty sleeves'. These responses all came from the write-in survey on the DoE website, i.e. a from non-representative, self-selecting group.

In the TNS survey, which is a nationally representative, weighted opinion poll of parents, 47% cited pictures in magazines and newspaper as encouraging children to act older than they are and 57% cited these pictures as putting pressure on children to conform to a particular body shape and size. For both questions, the top 'offender' was identified as 'celebrity culture' (58% and 65%) and, of course, newspapers and magazine are just about the most prolific celebrity in the UK, particularly when comes to the websites of tabloid and mid-market newspapers, i.e. The Sun and, particularly, The Daily Mail.

The Sun and Daily Mail have combined daily sales of around 6 million copies and attract a similar number of visitors to their websites every day. The big three celebrity magazines (Hello, Ok and Star) shift around 1.3 copies per issue. Northern and Shell's 'women's weeklies' have combined sales of over 1.3 million copies a week and many of these trade heavily on celebrity stories and on extremely prurient 'true life' stories of incest, sexual infidelity, sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Your reponse to these concerns in the report consists of just two paragraphs - one which explains that the Press Complaints Commission is as much use as a chocolate teapot while other describes the organisation which is supposed to self regulate teen magazines as a 'toothless watchdog' - and has nothing whatsoever to offer by any recommendations addressing what, from the TNS suvery, is much larger and more widespread area of concern.

Would you care to account for the very obvious anomalies in that position and explain why what seems to be a very major area of concern for parents who participated in your review was simply blown off with a couple of paragraphs that amount to 'Not my problem, Guv'?

I accept the difference between the two, but parents were quite clear that it was covers that concerned them, because you could not avoid them in public space, as it were. Whereas, although parents expressed concern about imagery in magazines and papers, you have a choice whether you buy those magazines and papers. You can't censor the whole press, and parents recognise that - they told us they did not want a heavy-handed set of regulations that imposed restrictions on what could or couldn't be sold. They simply wanted public space to be family-friendly.

Interestingly, in the meetings we had with retail distributors and publishers of magazines and newspapers, we were told that the number one complaint related to lads' mags and front page imagery being inappropriately on display. The inside content is a long way further down the complaints list. So it's not just one or the other. I think I'd like to see people voting with their feet and not buying that material, that needs confidence. I've already had one email from a mum who was so inspired by this recommendation that she went and told her local newsagent to remove the displays, and he did.

@slug

Instead of "Modesty Covers" (ugh, what a coy term) could you not recommend the lads mags etc covers are emblazoned with "THIS PUBLICATION OBJECTIFIES WOMEN" In large, friendly letters?

Great idea :)

We also know that things like six packs on the front of mens' fitness-type mags make many boys feel inadequate too, so we'll need more than one slogan!

What if you were talking to the wrong parents Mr Bailey?

I want people not to want these types of materials too.

Wait - Did I, the NEW JEREMY PAXMAN!! just get Reg Bailey to admit he is unqualified for his role?

Thanks Reg x