Friday - April 17, 2009

The risk of sexual abuse, by treating the victims’ discomfort with humour. ok but,,, DISNEY????

Not supposed to be here right now but hey.  This just HAD to get itself posted.

It’s way over my head. At first I thought, oh what nonsense. Come on.  But then another thought intruded on the first.
Hang on ... I’m not a parent. How can I judge this as nonsense when I haven’t any kids?

I guess my generation was lucky as was the one before when it came to this.  We never thought in the terms expressed by this article.
Still though .... hard for me to accept. Come on.  Pinocchio? Snow White?  Robin Hood?

Is this really valid or just a few ivory tower types with time on their hands and nothing else in their collective minds?

Was Pinocchio was being ‘groomed’ by his cartoon pals?
Classic Disney cartoon films are giving children the wrong message about how to deal with “stranger danger”, psychologists have warned.

By Roger Dobson

Was Pinocchio was being ‘groomed’ by his cartoon pals?
They claim films like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Robin Hood contain scenes in which children receive “unwanted personal contact” or threatening approaches from adults, and that the victims fail to set a good example in the way they respond.

The study warns that the films also undermine efforts to teach children about personal safety and how to minimise the risk of sexual abuse, by treating the victims’ discomfort with humour.

In one example, the researchers found that the Pinocchio had been “groomed” by the adult characters Honest John and Gideon but that his response to the abuse resembled “victim blaming”.

The report says that some characters, like Mowgli, in the Jungle Book, and Alice, in Alice in Wonderland, are able to successfully handle to threats they face from adults, suggesting they could have a positive educational impact on children. However, it points out that they do so without telling a trusted adult.

It adds: “It is possible that viewing these scenes could influence children to believe that telling a trusted adult about a stranger’s advances is unnecessary because the film characters model successful independence.”
The research, published in the journal Child Abuse, was conducted by a team of psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists at Carleton University, in Canada.

The academics wrote that they were “surprised to find depictions of children being touched, usually by adults, contrary to the expressed desires of the child”.
They studied 47 animated feature length Disney films, released between 1937 and 2006. In ten of them, they found examples of “unwanted personal contact” or scenes which show child characters in “risky situations”.

In their analysis, six films – Robin Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, The Sword in the Stone, and A Goofy Movie – depict children and adolescent characters experiencing unwanted personal contact.

A further four films – Snow White, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book – were found to show childlike characters in “risky situations” where strangers approach them with “hidden malevolence” and promise rewards in exchange for their compliance.

The films were reviewed several times, often using the pause and slow motion features to fully capture the content. Child characters could be human, fantastic or an anthropomorphised animal.

The child had to be under 18, and where age of the character was not specified, the researchers judged each on the basis of voice pitch, manner of speaking, stature, and behaviour.

Dr Wendy Hovdestad, the lead author, said: “The depictions of child and adolescent characters being grabbed and kissed against their will by adult characters is particularly problematic for the boy characters Wart (The Sword in the Stone), Flounder (The Little Mermaid), and Skippy (Robin Hood), because the context in the film is humorous.

“The treatment would probably be upsetting if it happened to a real child, and treating it as humorous is directly contradicting sexual safety education that teaches children that they get to decide who touches their bodies.”

The report concludes: “The findings raise questions about potential impacts on child audiences. Is the unwanted contact and risky situation content appropriate viewing for children, given efforts to teach children sexual safety?”
A Disney spokeswoman said, “As we have not studied the report we are unable to comment.”

PINOCCHIO?

Posted by peiper     on 04/17/2009 at 06:15 AM   
Filed Under: • Colleges-Professors • Scary Stuff • Sex • Television •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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