Especially for Parents
News and Commentary by Sharon Secor
January 2003
Welcome To Especially for Parents, a publication of Morality In Media.
Parents today face a variety of new challenges in raising their children. Many of these challenges relate directly to the negative influences of traditional mass media (TV, film, radio, etc) and now the Internet. It is our goal to provide up-to-date news about the rapidly developing Internet and other media, seeking out information particularly relevant to parents, so that parents can take action to protect their children.
In This Issue:
“What’s the difference between watching someone acting out a murder or sex scene and witnessing the real thing firsthand?” This is the question posed by Bethany Torode in her article, Avert Thine Eyes, published in the November 2002 issue of Boundless. Directed at college students, Boundless is an e-zine published weekly by Focus on the Family, a nonprofit organization founded in 1977 by Dr. James Dobson.
“Television is an unprecedentedly powerful medium,” she writes, “combining rapid sight and sound in a way that has a tremendous psychological effect. Companies wouldn’t pay millions of dollars for a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl if this wasn’t the case.”
Our passive participation through viewing, Torode suggests does have an effect on our minds and our perceptions. She points out that our bodies and minds are biologically bound to respond to the stimuli we encounter in our environment, real or simulated.
“The human soul is a sensitive instrument,” she writes, “and the basic impact of certain visual images on it remains constant.”
The Parents Television Council, a non-profit and nonpartisan organization formed in 1995, has published on its Web site an information sheet about children and television. The PTC quotes such sources as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Institute on Media and the Family. Points of interest include:
“By age 18, a U.S. youth will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence.”
“The average youth living in the U.S. watches television 25 hours a week and plays computer games an additional seven hours.”
“Children younger than 8 cannot uniformly discriminate between real life and fantasy/entertainment.”
“Media violence may cause aggressive and anti-social behavior, desensitize viewers to future violence and increase perceptions that they are living in a mean and dangerous world.”
“54% of kids have a TV in their bedroom.”
“Children spend more time watching television than in any other activity except sleep.”
“Television reaches more children at a younger age and for more time than any other socializing institution except the family.”
“Witnessing repeated violent acts can lead to desensitization and a lack of empathy for human suffering.”
In an article for the New York Daily News on October 14, 2002, staff reporter Maki Becker mentions a disturbing incident that occurred in a New York City public school. In the bathroom of his school, a kindergartner was beaten and sodomized by other children. Sadly, sexual assault on school grounds is not rare. Dr. Judith Reisman, president of the Institute for Media Education, found that, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 1999 more than 19,000 children were raped in school. This is 58% higher than the 12,000 reported victims of 1994.
Dr. Elissa Brown, a child and adolescent psychologist at the NYU Child Study Center, has said that children who perpetrate such crimes often are unlimited in their television viewing, many having pornography easily available to them.
“Nearly one out of four sexually active teens is living with a sexually transmitted disease at this moment,” writes Dr. Meg Meeker in her recent book, Epidemic: How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids. “Although teenagers make up just 10% of the population, they acquire between 20 and 25% of all STDs.”
Nor are these the relatively simple STDs of old. Dr. Meeker and Jon Knowles, public information director at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, are in agreement on this much, at least. In his published work, Mr. Knowles, as does Dr. Meeker in hers, refers to “the only” two STDs that were found in the population in the 1960’s and 70’s -- syphilis and gonorrhea, both curable.
Today, there are at least 25 different varieties of STDs, with many being incurable and capable of rendering victims infertile, some even leading to death.
And, here is where Planned Parenthood and similar organizations part company with Dr. Meeker and common sense. Dr. Meeker points out that the rates of venereal disease have dramatically increased, despite a significant rise in condom usage. The latest study put out by the National Survey of Family Growth, associated with the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, states that while in 1982 a mere 23% of teenaged girls used a condom during their first sexual experience, in 1995 that number increased to 63%.
“What we know right now is that what we’ve been doing for the past fifteen to twenty years, which is condom-based education, isn’t working because STDs are on the rise. And I think people believe that abstinence programs are run by people who aren’t informed of the medical facts – which is certainly not true – and [by] people who believe that sex is a bad thing, which also isn’t true,” said Dr. Meeker, quoted by Agape Press, a Christian news service.
Dr. Meeker also commented that in strictly medical terms, the only way to bring this health risk under control is to reduce teen sex, and expressed disappointment in the trend towards putting sexual freedom agendas before what best serves the health and protection of our nation’s children.
We enter into the new year with a firm commitment from our president, George W. Bush, that the government will act to protect our children from the dangers associated with pornography, particularly over the Internet.
“Anyone who targets a child for harm will be a primary target of law enforcement. That’s our commitment. Anyone who takes the life or innocence of a child will be punished to the full extent of the law,” said President Bush in October of 2002. “With the Internet, pornography is now instantly available to any child that has a computer.”
“Sexual predators use the Internet to distribute child pornography and obscenity,” the president explained. “They use the internet to engage in sexually explicit conversations. They use the Internet to lure children out of the safety of their homes into harms way.” The president pointed out that during the span of a year, 25% of children between 10 and 17 years of age are “involuntarily exposed to pornography”, with 20% of our children actually being sexually solicited during this period of time.
“We’ve got a widespread problem, and we’re going to deal with it.” The president plans to greatly increase funding for task forces devoted to doing exactly that. “We’re waging an aggressive nationwide effort to prevent the use of the Internet to sexually exploit and endanger children.”
The international community also is focusing attention on issues relating to children and pornography. Understanding that child pornography and the trafficking of children are related and are in fact global issues, the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children released a ten-step plan of action aimed at fighting these crimes at an international level:
- Build public awareness of the problem of child pornography
- Demand that child pornography be placed higher on the political agenda
- Create an international child pornography monitoring and oversight system
- Undertake extensive research to define and measure extent of problem
- Examine and evaluate current law enforcement practices
- Develop and promote systems for identifying the victims of child pornography
- Develop and promote model legislation and ensure consistency of law between nations
- Enhance the capacity of law enforcement to investigate and prosecute child pornography
- Promote information sharing and coordination between and among law enforcement, Internet hotlines, the media, and others
- Promote stronger involvement by private sector entities, including ISPs and NGOs
In Great Britain, there is a new offense that is prosecutable by law – that of paying for sex from a child. In an article in The Guardian, home affairs editor Alan Travis details the new laws.
“Any adult who pays for sex from a child under the age of 18 will face prosecution and a severe penalty – up to life imprisonment – under a tightening of prostitution laws,” writes Travis. An offender cannot escape prosecution by claiming that the underage person lied about her age. The law will also cover those who, while not specifically engaging in sexual activity with a minor, benefit from the sexual performance of a minor, such as pimps and pornographers.
“Sex with a child under 13 will carry a life sentence, between the ages 13 and 15 may attract a maximum 14-year prison sentence, and seven years in cases when the child is 16 to 17. The law will regard the child involved in prostitution as a victim and they will not face charges.” Luring a child into prostitution or pornography will have a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
In a policy statement made November 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics made very strong assertions about the effects of media violence on youth.
“The strength of the correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior found on meta-analysis is greater than that of calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection, or environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer – associations clinicians accept and on which preventive medicine is based without question,” according to the AAP’s Committee on Public Education.
The policy statement also made mention of violent video games, stating that playing such games “has been found to account for a 13% to 22% increase in adolescents’ violent behavior, by comparison, smoking tobacco accounts for 14% of the increase in lung cancer.” The AAP points out that “video games are an ideal environment in which to learn violence”, because the players are rewarded for being successfully violent, and suggests [?] that “the effects of child-initiated virtual violence may be even more profound than those of passive media, such as television.”
From the earliest days of radio and television, mass media and mass marketing have been closely intertwined, shaping our modern culture. Today, more than ever, these forces combine not only to shape our society, but to mold our perceptions of our culture, normalizing a variety of social changes and concepts, marketing a way of life. And today, more than ever, these marketing efforts target our youth, particularly through the media outlets most likely to reach them – music, movies and television.
Teens spent 172 billion dollars in 2001, according to the market research company Teenage Research Unlimited. The 1997 International Mass Retail Association statistics cited by Laura Batts, senior brand manager, of Advanced Research Laboratories, show that children ages 8 to 12 spend approximately 15 billion dollars per year of their own money, and influence about 30 billion dollars of their parents’ purchases. It is no wonder, then, that mass marketers have our youth in their sights. By 2010, researchers estimate, 21% of our population will be teenagers, the greatest percentage in our history. Thus, we can expect efforts to gain control of those discretionary dollars to become even more aggressive.
In a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Jonie Mitchell, long-time singer and song writer, said that she was “ashamed” to be a part of the music industry, referring to it as a “cesspool”. “It is tragic what MTV has done to the world,” she stated. She also spoke of her dismay at the behavior of her grandchild, a three-year-old girl. Evidently, the child mimics the suggestive dancing she sees on the music videos, gyrating and “grabbing her crotch”. Although Ms. Mitchell did express her dismay at MTV’s social irresponsibility, she made no mention of the irresponsibility involved in allowing a child to play in a “cesspool”.
On October 24, 2002, the New York Daily News ran a photo of Christina Aguilera that recently graced the cover of Blender magazine. She was almost-dressed in clichéd porn-gear – heavy black eyeliner, black leather bra, thigh-high black fish net stockings, legs spread, with a pair of hand cuffs attached to one wrist, the other cuff resting in what apparently is meant to be an alluring fashion on the crotch of her black panties. This is typical of how she styles herself of late. In fact, it was more than she wore to the MTV Video Awards. The videos that accompany her newly released album, Stripped, are, even by industry standards, vulgar. According to several news sources, including MTV News on October 18, 2002, the Thai language posters in the background of a segment of her video Dirrty translate to English as advertising ‘Thailand’s Sex Tourism’ and “Young Underage Girls”.
Ex-Mouseketeer Aguilera is one of a few ‘teen pop queens’ that have been actively marketed to young girls. On Monday, January 15, 2001, the Publicity & News section of the New Media area of Scholastic.com of Australia, ran an announcement heralding the arrival of the interactive CD-ROM, Christina Aguilera: Follow Your Dreams. “This software title,” it states, “- narrated by Christina – is aimed at girls ages seven and older.” In 2000, Yaboom Ltd., a company formed of a partnership between Toymax International, Inc. and Street Life Ltd., an entertainment and leisure products company, put out two “Barbie-sized” Aguilera dolls. Department stores throughout the nation continue to sell miniature versions of the belly-baring styles made popular by Aguilera and others of the genre.
The New York Times, October 21, 2002, reported that the music industry, with the exception of the Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), opposes a bipartisan Congressional proposal for stronger advisory label standards. The sponsors, headed by Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Representative Billy Tauzin, a Republican from Louisiana, hope to force the music industry to be more specific as to the type of content that the advisory labels warn of.
Russell Simmons, chairman of the hip-hop Summit Action Network and rap promoter, is among those in opposition to the proposed changes. He believes that labeling practices that would allow parents to make more informed decisions about music purchases are “a move towards censorship, which is un-American.”
Hilary Rosen, chairperson and chief executive of the recording industry association, sees no reason to institute new labeling standards as, according to her, most teens download music from the Internet without parental supervision of content.
“There is no labeling on the Internet,” Ms. Rosen said. “If anyone is going to express concern, that’s what it should be about.”
The Times points out that the music industry has great concerns about the amount of money lost when people download music for free from the Internet rather than buy CDs. In fact, the Recording Industry Association of America has recently asked Congress to protect its members from such “piracy.” Congress is considering trading their help in the regulation of Internet music downloading for labeling concessions from the music industry.
During the final few months of 2002, a crop of R-rated movies sprang up, with the teen factor – being about teenagers or college students, having content appealing primarily to teens, or starring media figures with a strong teen following. Among these are:
Jackass: the Movie, a Paramount production, is rated R for dangerous stunts, crude humor, nudity and language. Jack Mathews of the New York Daily News wrote that this movie “is the biggest lowdown, rotten, disgusting, depraved sideshow in the megaplex.” Because of stunts that include the insertion of a toy car into a rectum and the eating of urine snow-cones, his description is apt. The New York Times reported comments by Paul Dergarabedian, chairman of Exhibitor Relations, a Los Angeles company that tracks box-office statistics, in which he speaks of Viacom, Paramount’s parent company, marketing the film in “outlets most likely to attract young viewers.”
The Rules of Attraction is rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, language, and violence. Set on a college campus, the movie stars teen heart-throb James Van Der Beek from WB’s Dawson’s Creek. New York Daily News movie critic Jamie Bernard gave it a star and a half, and wrote of “the vulgarity of the material” and characters that “generally regard life as one big toilet” (October 11, 2002). She commented in particular on a female character, “a girl so eager to lose her virginity that she tosses it away in a scene so revolting you’ll be excused if you don’t see the humor in it.”
The movie 8 Mile is rated R for violence, drug use, sexual content, and language. In a column printed in the New York Daily News on November 17, 2002, Mike Barnicle writes of 8 Mile that “if any parent ever allowed a kid under 16 to go see it, they should be arrested.” He described the movie as being “like the soundtrack CD selling out everywhere, along with the vast majority of Eminem’s previous stuff: it is over the top with vulgarity.”
The film has been a draw to underage fans of his music. Spot checks nationwide, conducted by the Parents Television Council found that children as young as 14 were able to gain admittance, unchallenged by theater staff.
Information released by the PTC on November 8, 2002, indicates that Universal Studios sought to attract a teen audience, through advertising the movie during television shows known to have large numbers of teen watchers, such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek. According to the PTC, quoting Entertainment Weekly, the “studio wanted to release 8 Mile over the summer, when Eminem’s teenage fans would be out of school.”
Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America, in an article published November 14, 2002 on the CWA Web site, raised an interesting issue concerning the response to a letter printed in the Dear Abby advice column. The letter appeared on November 8, 2002. A mother wrote, expressing her dismay at her daughter’s dealings in Internet porn. Her daughter was making a lot of money on her ‘soft porn’ sites, pulling in $100,000.00 during the year before. Yet, the mother was understandably unable to “come to terms” with her daughter’s profession.
As Mr. Knight points out, rather than to validate or even respect the mother’s moral concerns in relation to the turn that her daughter’s life had taken, the advice the woman received from Dear Abby was, at its essence, that she should change herself.
“She has built a successful business and wants you to respect what she has accomplished,” advised the column. Further wisdom followed. “…[T]ry to accept that this is a choice she has made, and focus on her positive qualities: She’s bright, sweet and loving, not to mention a whiz at business.”
Empowering. Liberating. An adventure. These are words offered by middle class women in describing their forays into the world of “sex work.” Professor Donna M. Hughes, of the University of Rhode Island Women’s Studies Program, has commented on the fairly recent increase in the number of articles written by middle class women dabbling in stripping and prostitution that attempt to legitimize such activities as just another career choice.
Professor Hughes speaks at universities across the country about the trafficking of women and children for the sex trades and has remarked upon the growing college campus fashion, among faculty and students, of insisting that such activities are empowering to women.
“They have read that it’s true,” she wrote in November 2002. “What more proof do they need?”
Unfortunately these views are not limited to ivory tower campus theorists. According to a November 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal report on a Honolulu conference on global trafficking taking place that week, although Sen. Hillary Clinton did speak out against trafficking, “Mrs. Clinton’s anti-trafficking rhetoric is belied by an ideological disposition – pushed during her husband’s administration – to try to exempt from prosecution pimps and handlers and women who have ‘voluntarily’ chosen prostitution.”
Concerned Women (CWA) for America has made public the results of research on the “white-collar pornography industry”. Included is data on the estimated earnings of major mainstream corporations involved in profiting from pornography, including:
- AT&T, Time Warner, Direct TV, Echostar, etc. (cable and satellite TV)
- Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, etc. (hotel chains)
- American Express, Mastercard, VISA (cedit card companies)
- AT&T, MCI Worldcom, etc. (900 phone sex market)
In an October 30, 2002, statement, Jan LaRue, CWA Chief Counsel, said in part: “Profiting from porn-peddling is a dirty ring around the white collars at AT&T, MCI, Time Warner, Comcast, Echo Star, Direct TV, Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, VISA, Mastercard and American Express…Much of the blame for this mainstreaming of pornography lies with the refusal of the Clinton/Reno Justice Department to enforce the federal obscenity laws…However, the boards of directors and shareholders should ponder their profits in light of the fact that the pornography they distribute and market as ‘hard-core’ is prosecutable under federal and most state laws.”
Parents feel they’re failing to teach values headlines a November 7, 2002, USA Today article. Parents see a tough moral rival in popular culture reads the headline for an October 31, 2002, Washington Times article. These articles provide key results of a recent parenting survey by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, public-opinion research firm.
“My sense from this study, and it’s really painful, is that parents just feel absolutely abandoned, they feel as if they are being sabotaged at every turn,” said Deborah Wadsworth, president of Public Agenda, according to the Washington Times article. She said that the difficulties faced by earlier generations of parents were of a different nature, and that “we did not feel as if our kids were surrounded by hazards of every kind. We felt that there were allies – institutional allies – and the real world reinforced the values that we wanted to teach our kids.”
Surveying 1,607 parents of children aged 5 to 17 by telephone, Public Agenda found that 76% of parents believed that raising children properly was much more difficult today, as compared to prior generations; 73% were concerned about negative media messages; 47% said that what worried them most was protecting their children from “negative societal influences”.
The study also found that 34% of parents believed they had been successful in teaching their children self-control, 55% feel they’ve taught their kids to be honest and 62% consider their children to be courteous.
In a column published in Newsday on October 26, 2002, titled Sex – Is There Joy In Not Knowing?, Ellen Goodman made reference to recent studies about teenagers, parents and sex. In one, conducted by Child Trends, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization, it was found that teenagers that are having sex are most likely doing it in their own homes. Another, by the University of Minnesota, found that half of the mothers of teens who were engaging in sexual activity were unaware of their teen’s behavior. Oddly enough, the same study found that of mothers who “strongly disapproved of teen sex”, 45% of their boys and 30% of their girls were unaware of this disapproval.
“I think we need to reacquaint parents with the job of parenting,” said Sarah Brown, of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, as quoted by Goodman.
In a New York Daily News article titled Nothing But Net, published on October 11, 2002, reporter Michelle Megna wrote of the results of a recent study of Internet usage by 7.1 million recent and soon-to-be parents. The study was conducted during the first quarter of 2002 by Comscore Media Metrix, which provides Internet Audience Measurement services.
“The sites that drew the highest concentration of moms,” Megna wrote, “included family community sites and home furnishing retailers, while the pages that were most popular with the men were toy retailers and porn sites.”
The family hour, the first of the prime time television viewing hours, came into official being in 1975. It was a very delayed legislative response to public concerns and congressional inquiries, the first of which was in 1952, in regard to television broadcast content. Although the Writers’ Guild of America and other groups were successful in challenging the restriction of material during that hour on claimed First Amendment and anti-trust grounds, the networks voluntarily continued (by-and-large) to reserve that hour for programs suitable for all ages. Today, however, it seems that the family hour has become a relic of the past, broken and tarnished by overtly sexual, vulgar and violent content.
According to a Parent Teen Council report dated March 2002, “an average of 10 million children are in front of the TV set during the family hour”. When, in the 1970’s, the FCC was extolling the virtues of “self-regulation”, it commented that “government rules could create the risk of improper governmental interference in sensitive, subjective decisions about programming, could tend to freeze present standards and could also discourage creative developments in the medium.”
And, oh, how creative they’ve become. By age 18, the Parent Teen Council states, a child has witnessed 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence in the glow of the television screen. On March 30 of 2002, the Parents Television Council released an analysis report, What a Difference a Decade Makes : A Comparison of Prime Time Sex, Language and Violence in 1989 and ’99. Analyzing four weeks of autumn programming in each time period, the PTC found that “on a per-hour basis, sexual material was more than three times as frequent in ’99 as it was in ’89.” In addition, the study revealed that “oral sex, which was never mentioned during the 1989 study period, was alluded to 20 times during four weeks in 1999. References to kinky sex rose from 13 to 60 mentions. References to genitalia rose 700 percent on a per-hour basis, and references to homosexuality were 24 times more common in 1999.”
I long for the standards that, in the 1970’s, offered such family hour programs as the Waltons and Little House on the Prairie. I remember how pleased my mother was that I had read the whole ‘Little House’ series and because I even knew the name of the author, she allowed me to stay up the extra half hour past my bedtime to watch the whole program. Today, there is not a single prime time show that I allow my children to watch.
I have no desire to explain to my children such family hour fare as the vulgar and dysfunctional families portrayed on Malcom in the Middle and the Simpsons. I do not find the revolving bed partners and the who-is-the-father mystery that surrounded the pregnancy of one of the unmarried characters of the program Friends to be valuable “teaching moments”. The various incarnations of reality TV hits Survivor and Big Brother present no reality that I choose to share with my children. I do not fully understand why CBS chose to air the Victoria’s Secret fashion show – nor am I sure why it is referred to as such, since I tend to associate fashion shows with clothing – at 8 p.m., advertised as “The Sexiest Night of Television”, despite the fact that when ABC ran it at 9 p.m. last year, there were numerous complaints in regard to content. So many, in fact, that ABC let the rights to the show pass this year.
That ABC passed on the show demonstrates clearly that we do have the power to reclaim our hour. And reclaim it we should. Our children deserve a vision of love and family that is not cheapened, stripped of its beauty and mystery, and they deserve a vision of the world and its possibilities that is not darkened and distorted by gratuitous sex, vulgarity and violence. They deserve their childhood.
One of the most important things that we as parents can do to protect our families from the destructive influence of pornography and popular culture is to use our own influence as citizens and consumers by becoming activists. Each act can make a difference. Signing petitions, writing letters, and sending e-mails are effective means of letting public officials and corporate executives know what we expect of them and in demonstrating our support for those who make right choices. Each day we can also vote with our dollars, supporting companies that respect community values and avoiding those that don’t.
One way to help bring back the family hour is by urging the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the federal broadcast indecency law [18 U.S.C. 1464] against TV stations (licensees), particularly during the family hour.
www.moralityinmedia.org (Radio/TV indecency) recently published an informative interview with FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on the need for broadcast indecency law enforcement; and www.cultureandfamily.org has instructions on how to make an indecency complaint about a particular broadcast TV program or advertisement.
You can also write the five FCC Commissioners individually to let them know how you feel about the glut of gratuitous sex, vulgarity and violence on broadcast TV during the family hour.
You can contact the five Commissioners:
By E-mail:
Michael Powell, Chairman: mpowell@fcc.gov
Kathleen Abernathy, Commissioner: kabernat@fcc.gov
Michael Copps, Commissioner: mcopps@fcc.gov
Kevin Martin, Commissioner: kjmweb@fcc.gov
Jonathan Adelstein, Commissioner: jadelste@fcc.gov
U.S. Mail:
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street SW
Washington, DC 20554
If you can, please also send a copy of your complaint, e-mail or letter to Morality in Media, 475 Riverside Dr., New York, 10115 or to mim@moralityinmedia.org