EXCERPTS
Imagine an elementary school where children are taught that boys should be brutally violent, that girls should be sexual objects, that identity and self worth are defined by what you own, that parents are dolts useful only for buying you stuff, and that obsessive and compulsive behaviour is normal and cool. Would you send your kids to this school?
Well, according to legal theorist and author Joel Bakan, your children are probably already signed up. This is the "new curriculum of childhood," and if your kids are growing up in the United States or Canada, they are very probably having it drummed into their brains quite effectively right now. They are learning this corrosive curriculum by virtue of the time they spend in front of television or computer screens or on their smart phones, where they are constantly exposed to corporate marketing and influence.
And since the average tween or teen spends about twice as much time in front of these screens as he or she does at school, this is by far the more influential curriculum.
Sadly, this is not the only way corporations are targeting and harming our kids, according to Bakan's disturbing new book, Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Callously Targets Children. Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, argues that over the last 30 years, our politicians have gradually granted corporations ever-increasing freedom to poison, brainwash, drug and otherwise harm our children in the blind pursuit of profits. As a society, we have sanctioned this, naively believing that the market will take care of everything, including our children.
In his 2005 bestselling book, The Corporation (subsequently made into an award-winning documentary film), Bakan established that corporations resemble human psychopaths, because they are legally bound to pursue their own economic interests regardless of the harm this may cause others.
In this new work, Bakan focuses on how these corporate entities with psychopathic tendencies actually view children as nothing more than marketing opportunities, studying and preying on their particular vulnerabilities and immature emotions to sell products or maximize profits.
Bakan looks at five main ways corporations harm kids:
Media: Corporations invest millions to figure out how to reach kids through social media, computer games and television. The goal is to encourage obsessive behaviour or "stickiness," so the kids will keep buying games and equipment, or keep coming back to sites or TV shows where they will be exposed to advertising. Bakan talks to several leading names in children's marketing, who tell us that any method of doing this is fair game. Young children get obsessed with feeding and caring for virtual pets, for example, often weeping and panicking if they can't have access, in fear that the pets will suffer or die. Teens get hooked on checking all the nasty things their "friends" are saying about them anonymously on Facebook applications like Honesty Box.
Pharmaceuticals: Bakan describes how pharmaceutical companies have influenced and all but bribed doctors to prescribe psychotropic drugs to kids, and co-opted scientific research by suppressing negative data and paying off researchers to get the results they wanted. He focuses on antidepressant manufacturers' efforts to suppress information that some of their products actually increased suicidal behaviour in youth. But he also offers a litany of recent convictions of pharmaceutical companies for crimes that will shock even the most cynical among us.
Toxic chemicals: Bakan shows that North American governments have failed miserably in their attempts to regulate the toxic chemicals that industries have been dumping into the environment (and into children's bodies) in record amounts in recent decades. Since kids are particularly vulnerable to environmental pollutants, this has led to skyrocketing rates of chronic diseases like asthma, childhood leukemia and brain cancer.
Child labour: Weak child labour laws are helping corporations make more money, but making life a misery for millions of children, particularly immigrants or children of immigrants, in many North American jurisdictions, including (surprisingly) British Columbia.
Education: Attempts to reform the U.S. school system are being hijacked by corporations, such as the standardized testing industry and "education management organizations," so that education is being redesigned to serve the corporate agenda, rather than children or society in general.
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- reprinted from the Montreal Gazette