Down with the kids

Big Brother has started again in Australia this week and I thought I would dedicate a post to setting out why I believe this show is a bad influence on our children and potentially damaging the fabric of our communities! I should state at this point that I have no qualifications in the area of psychology or sociology (or in fact any relevant discipline), but I don’t think I need qualifications to commentate on this stuff, it’s obvious. It’s a clear cut case of the the Emperors new Clothes!

In Australia Big Brother screens at 7pm. This assures it an audience of teenagers and tweenies. Even more disturbingly a number of early Primary School children and younger watch the show! I have heard preschool children recite who is left in the house, and who is up for eviction!

Bullying is a big issue. No one wants their kid to be bullied or be accused of being a bully themselves. Schools and other organisations spend lots of time, money and professional hours trying to eradicate or at least control this kind behavior. Almost all reality TV, and most definitely Big Brother use group aggression as part of the “entertainment”, most obviously this is through the eviction of individuals who are, for whatever reason, less popular.

So here we are telling our kids one thing, bullying is wrong and we have an obligation to stand up for kids weaker than ourselves, and then we sit them down in front of hours of footage of real people indulging in bullying behavior against each other, and not just anyone but the kind of people kids find compelling as role models, the young and attractive, and what’s more - cool!

This interaction isn’t censured by the grown ups, its glorified, it makes these kids on TV popular, and famous! The worst part is that the worth of these kids - whether they win, is based on how popular they are. Is this what we want our kids to emulate, popularity at all cost? What about doing the right thing, learning skills, making a real difference to the world? It reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons where Bart asks Homer how important it is to be popular and Homer replies along the lines of - “You’ve got to be kidding, it’s the only thing that matters!”

Big Brother turns all of us into voyeurs, observing the private moments of a group of people, watching their humiliations and savoring their failures. It then becomes “normal” to observe peoples real life, even when it includes bullying and humiliation. It’s acceptable to watch this stuff for entertainment, removed from any feelings of empathy or any obligation to involve yourself and assist someone in trouble.

Last year in Werribee (a suburb of Melbourne) a group of teenage boys were arrested after a dvd came to light which showed them allegedly sexually assaulting, taunting and humiliating a girl with a mild intellectual disability. The boys are awaiting trial. This dvd had done the rounds, apparently viewed by thousands of people on youtube, sold for $5 in a number of schools and even viewed by some of the perpetrators parents! The criminal, cruel and degenerate acts of the teenagers is one thing, but how about all the people that saw the footage and did nothing about it?

I’d like to bring my kids up so that if a dvd like that was being circulated they would have the sense and moral integrity to say, hang on a minute, this is vile, and illegal and someone needs to stand up for that victim. I’d hope they’d tell me, or a teacher - or someone! I know what I’d do - I’d go straight to the cops!

So the parents and adults that saw this stuff on youtube or through dvds their kids had in hand - what were they thinking? Does it not matter if its not your little girl being assaulted and degraded? Are we so inured to watching peoples “reality” in gory detail on TV that this is just an extension?

The people selected for the house are young, generally physically attractive and ready to expose all and become engaged in sexual liaisons as part of the “game”. The message this is giving to kids at really impressionable ages of their sexual development frightens me. It’s suggesting that sex is a game with winners and losers, something to be played and manipulated. Worse still its a voyeuristic spectator sport for others. I have heard kids under 10 speculating on who someone would “get with” now someone else had been evicted from the house!

Last season when there was an incredible badly (could I suggest deliberately?) mishandled issue involving an alleged sexual assault. The press for this coincided with the Diane Brimble’s Coronial Inquest. For those readers not from Australia, or not familiar with the story, Diane Brimble was a woman who, while on a cruise ship, died of an overdose of a date rape drug. While she lay dyeing on the floor of the cabin of a group of men she was sexually assaulted, ridiculed and photographed.

The portrait of the men present at the time of her death was grim. One in particular was described as being heavily involved in the party scene, where he didn’t so much date women as find vulnerable woman and “chalk them up”. I wondered where this kind of mentality could come from? I need only look to the coverage of Big Brother in the very same newspapers. Here we have a 7pm show, aimed at our impressionable kids that promote sex in exactly the same way - a spectator sport, something to be manipulated for your own gain!

What do we want our kids to grow up believing about their bodies, other peoples bodies and sex? Personally I want my kids to understand that sex is about mutual attraction and mutual pleasure, and hopefully even love! Even casual sex should be about having a great time with someone you fancy. It’s not about “beating people”, it’s not about status, and its most certainly not about taking advantage, humiliating or degrading people weaker than yourself! I believe Big Brother promotes a very ugly face of sexuality and does so to a very impressionable audience.

How does all this differ from Soap Operas and all sorts of drama that kids watch in similar time-slots? I believe there is something fundamentally different between watching real people, allegedly “being themselves”, and watching a scripted and acted drama. For a start fiction will have consequences that are played out - the cool bully always comes a cropper!

I also find it laughable that the same guidelines that would apply to a fictionalised show are applied to reality TV. They edit out the language and put a stripe across the bums and its OK for the community to be subjected to the rest of it? A scripted scene between actors as part of a drama has some purpose and even the littlest kids know is pretend.  It has quite a different impact.

So what would the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes do if he had been raised on Big Brother? I doubt he’d speak up, why would he - he might get voted off next week, and after all, in the immortal words of Homer Simpson “that’s the only thing that matters”!