Confronting Child Sex Ads Draw Flak
By Chloe Saltau
Originally published in the The Sun-Herald, December 16, 2001
A sexually confronting advertisement depicting a man in a hotel room with a young Asian girl will screen this week as part of an aggressive new campaign against the exploitation of children.
It comes a week after the Federal Government announced it would ratify an optional protocol designed to stamp out child prostitution and pornography, and after a report claimed an alarming number of children in Australia were selling sex for money and drugs.
But the television commercials, made by Saatchi & Saatchi in New York for international aid agency UNICEF, and shared with World Vision, are sure to raise the ire of some elements of the community.
Another agency fighting child exploitation, Childwise, has questioned the value of shock tactics, saying the advertisements risked alienating the public. In one of the community service announcements, a man wearing a towel in a dark room is talking to his wife and daughter on the phone.
When he hangs up, the camera pans to a slight Asian girl on the end of the bed and the man rests a hand on her shoulder. Other advertisements deal with a pedophile writing emails to a teenage boy. The boy thinks he is talking to a girl called "Debbie", but she turns out to be an older man.
Bernadette McMenamin, national director of Childwise, the Australian arm of the global End Child Prostitution Pornography and Trafficking organisation, said people turn away from that sort of material. "If there's one thing we've learnt working and educating people over the past 10 years, it's that you've got to give them hope."
The chief executive of World Vision, Lyn Arnold, defended the advertisements, saying they were part of a worldwide push to raise awareness during the Second World Congress against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, which starts in Yokohama today.
"Yes, they are confronting and we don't apologise for that, because frankly there are children in the world whose innocence is stolen by adults, and some of those adults are Australians," Mr Arnold said. "This is not artificial, this is not fiction. This is real life. The alternative is to say nothing, and where does saying nothing get these children?"
Mr Arnold, a former premier of South Australia, called on state governments to implement complementary legislation in line with the optional protocol. He also called on the Australian Federal Police to produce evidence that the rate of prosecutions had been maintained since its specialist unit investigating Australians engaged in child sex tourism was closed down.
Spokeswomen for UNICEF and World Vision said the community service announcements would not screen before 9.30pm.
Monsignor Christopher Prowse, vicar general in the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, said the sexual exploitation of children was a "terrible moral scourge", and any reasonable attempt to stop it should be commended. However, he said it remained to be seen whether the community service announcements were reasonable and appropriate for an Australian audience.
