Industry | 2009.12.28
Let's be honest: we are using fat kids as a political decoy | Zoe Williams
All these strategies about children\'s health boil down to one thing: harmony between state and commercial sectors
Just the sight of "children" and "advertising" in the same sentence sends me off into my mayonnaise rant. (You\'re not allowed to advertise it pre-watershed, did you know? Its fat and salt content is too high. Of all the ludicrous criticisms ever levelled against this condiment of gods). However, a new report takes a racier, more chilling direction about the two phenomena than any previous work sponsored by the government, I think.
Previous to the launch this week of The Impact of the Commercial World on Children\'s Wellbeing , the official line went like this: children are targeted by ads, because they are more susceptible to the message than are adults; the message is "Eat more highly processed, rubbish food"; this will make them fat; they will end up as fat adults, causing a massive national health crisis.
None of these statements is in itself untrue, but I have a few issues. First, ads aren\'t all for food; in fact, few are. A regular viewer of children\'s telly will see that most are for stuff, acres of pointless stuff. But barely anyone – or barely anyone with an official remit relating to advertising standards – talks about this consumerist bombardment, because that would be too ethically complicated, and the understanding is that conversations about children should be kept as uncontroversial as possible. What could be less controversial than fat? Nobody likes fat – who would want a fat kid?
Second, a pressure group called Consumers International distils the consensus view on marketing to children: "While parents may ultimately be responsible for feeding children, aggressive marketing is undermining their efforts – parents may be telling their children to eat healthy food, but food company advertising is telling children that unhealthy food products are desirable to eat." This is pompous to the point of inaccuracy. You don\'t need an advert to tell you that unhealthy food is desirable; it\'s desirable because it\'s delicious. The advertising industry wishes that it had the kind of influence attributed to it: because the main factor of influence here is the truth.
And third: yes, obesity is something to tackle in childhood – that\'s when you lay down the fat cells for your entire life, so it\'s good if there aren\'t too many of them. And yet in advertising standards guidelines, as in government health campaigns, the message is underhand. The government doesn\'t want to preach healthy eating straight to adults, because that would set it up in direct opposition to manufacturers, which is not the modern way. In children, then, they find a neutral space, where the state and commercial sectors can meet in their protective enthusiasm.
Exactly the same compromise was once brokered with the tobacco lobby (before everybody was forced to conclude that it really was lethal) – so long as we can keep children off them, everything is OK. This worldview imagines children as totally separate entities from adults, existing in their chamber of purity, easily inoculated against the undesirable behaviours that beset the rest of us. Moreover, all these strategies and conversations about health profess to be for the good of children, but are actually about maintaining harmony between private sector and state.
Professor David Buckingham \'s report goes way beyond food and television ads; in part beyond what we would even recognise as advertising. A section on schools detailing the bombardment children experience ranges from vending machines and posters in public spaces, to sponsorships, commercial involvement in the running of schools, and the deals whereby a private company might run the exam board and also have a deal with a publishing company ("And these aren\'t not-for-profit organisations, these companies are all making a profit," he reminds me.) Private money echoes through every (state) educational corridor, and the acceptance of it is never without consequence.
Yet, still, this is not really about children, as Buckingham concludes: "The reality is we lived in a mixed economy, we\'re making a transition from a welfare state to a neoliberal capitalist system, and in the process, the boundary between the public and the private is shifting significantly but also imperceptibly. And that\'s a political question."
Once again, though, the issues that frame the media\'s approach to this report are how we teach our children to respond to marketing stimuli (not "Do we want those stimuli there in the first place?"); and what impact on their childhood these influences might have. (Not "Is the money actually worth it, for all the messages it comes tied up with? Wouldn\'t we rather see a return to public funding, which, while not totally free from agenda, is at least free from the agenda of ceaselessly dangling before us stuff we previously didn\'t need?") And, again, the motivation is underhand – children, in a discursive context, are like birds or donkeys. They are single issues, and force a consensus because they remind us that we\'re all on the same side, the side of niceness.
In fact, we\'re not all on the same side. The issues at stake have little to do with children, and everything with oppositional politics: state funding or private funding? To tax or not to tax? To redistribute and regulate, or to let the values of the market caper unfettered? Lacking the courage to tackle these large, prickly issues, we persist in trying to debate from behind a rhetorical five-year-old.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]at-decoy-children-health-state
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