What's on the Menu for Kids? Sex & Violence.

I wrote an article a couple of days ago about child bombers in Iraq and the exploitation of children. There are a couple of things that have caught my attention since and I need to expand the topic because the stuff I have noticed has made me very cross indeed.

As a society, we are always going on about how unruly teenagers and kids younger sometimes, if you like the hoodie generation are rude, undisciplined and are contributing to the breakdown of society in general. They swear, spit, smoke, drink, take drugs, have sex, have orgies, have babies, vandalise property, bully, mug people, stab people and shoot people. They are not afraid of authority or society but authority and society is afraid of them.

The two things that have vexed me this week are the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 and the fuss over child actress Miley Cyrus who recently posed for Vanity Fair. Dealing with Miley first, she was photographed half naked except for a sheet on a bed. The shots are provocative and meant to be sexy. I cannot think of any other reason for the photographs being taken in the way and location that they were, other than to make the viewer want to think about sex. The problem is that this is a 15 year old girl, which makes them immoral and from the point of view of Vanity Fair, irresponsible.

We live in a society where we seem to be encouraging children to accept sex at an earlier and earlier age. As adults we have over the last 20 or 30 years or so allowed hardcore pornography to enter the mainstream and this is filtering into all aspects of our culture. Pop stars have progressively started to wear less and show more in their videos and on stage and I don't think I would have much of a problem with this except that pop these days is increasingly aimed at children as well as teenagers. Singers like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and even Dannii Minogue (possibly Kylie too) don't dance anymore, they strip with their clothes on and drape themselves over equally scantily dressed chaps. Britney has done lesbian scenes with Madonna. Christina has danced around in not more than her knickers in some videos and in a recent video from Dannii Minogue, I was bemused to see her dance troop in the background were dressed in dayglo rubber fetish gear with WWII Nazi helmets.

Despite how things may appear, I am not a prude but I am a firm believer of things being in their proper place. Soft porn is not welcome and should not have a place in music that is aimed at children. These pop stars are people who are incredibly popular and influential on the outlook of our children and they should be made to take this responsibility seriously or have the responsibility taken away from them. As a country we have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world second only to the US where the majority of this garbage comes from. Our children see people like Britney, Christina and others behaving in this way and think that this is the path to success and stardom. They are probably right. Miley Cyrus plays the character Hannah Montana, a school girl who leads a secret life as a pop star. The program is played on the Disney channel which is presumably aimed at children as young as 3 or 4 years old. Although nothing to do with Disney, the fact is that one of their biggest child actors is posing for shots like this when she is in deed herself a child and in my opinion this gives her fans an absolutely abhorrent message. How can we expect our children to have any kind of a childhood if the message we are programming them with from such an early age is all about sex.

Sadly, the fact is that the message is not only about sex. The message we are giving them is actually as much about violence as it is about sex. The Grand Theft Auto series of video games has or is releasing its latest offering of criminal violence, arcade style. I haven't played any of the games although I have seen them played and as far as I can make out in order to win, you have to commit as much crime on screen, from theft to murder as you possibly can.

The games carry an 18 certificate in the UK and the manufacturer has always maintained that this series is aimed at adults. I would disagree. I think the manufacturers are well aware that this game will end up in the hands of children and is quite happy to shirk its civic, moral and ethical responsibility as long as it can be seen to at least fulfil its legal duties whilst making huge profits for owners and shareholders. The fact is that this game which glorifies extreme violence and crime will end up in the hands of children in the same way cigarettes, alcohol, pornography, drugs, knives and guns do; through lacsidasical and irresponsible parents and criminal gangs.

Aside from the immoral and unethical attitude of the commercial interests involved here, I am concerned about the actual effects that these games have on children. I think that these games provide the next step up from simply observing violence and in fact provide the final step to the performance of violence. The manufacturers will argue vehemently against my views, however I think it should be noted that many organisations utilise both computer and real life simulations to train individuals and employees to work and react in a certain way to certain situations. In fact regular use of simulators help to program responses to certain situations into our subconscious minds. That is why when we practice things regularly enough we can do them without thinking about them, like driving for example. It is the same reason why the army, when it is not fighting, is constantly training. It is so they will react correctly when called upon. If you want to become a pilot in the RAF, you train on simulators first. When you take your driving test now, part of that test is done on a simulator. A video game that simulates the life and violent crimes of a gangster in the most graphic and realistic way would therefore train someone to do what? The question is rhetorical.

The fact is that there is probably little research into the link between video game violence and real life violence, who on earth would commission it? However there is a definite drop in the moral standards and manners of our children and nation. I think it would be wrong to blame the video game industry and the pop industry for the endemic problems we face as a society, after all I think that they are just exploiting the problems and making them worse in the process. I do think that we need to learn to say no as a society though without being petrified about being accused of restricting peoples freedom of expression. Until we start to say no, our children are going to continue to be exploited and exposed to sex and violence at an increasingly younger age group and I think that is wrong. We have rights in this country that we have fought for and won over hundreds of years against the state. We cannot now allow those rights now to be taken away from us by commerce and we have to defend the innocence of our children at all costs because nobody else will. How can we expect our children to behave and respect us if the message we give them is absolute tolerance. If we allow this to continue, we might as well forget the rule of law and officially accept anarchy with open arms. I hope that we are not ready to do this just yet and I hope that we have a little bit of respect left in ourselves to do the right thing at some point in the not too distant future.