Call for child media law

Clare Kermond February 17, 2012

THE best protection for children against harmful media would be a children's consumer law, backed up by a powerful regulator, a prominent researcher says.

Law professor Elizabeth Handsley, head of the Australian Council on Children and the Media, said the government was doing little to tackle the growing hard sell aimed at children, and the advertising industry's self-regulation was mostly public relations.

She said there was growing concern about the increasing use of sexuality to market to children, as well as bad language and violence.

''The message of this sort of marketing is telling children that you have to look a certain way … you need to own and use certain products in order to be happy and successful and quite often those products are things that we do normally associate with women and their attempts to be sexy for men, things like make-up and clothes and high heels that are creeping into childhood,'' she said.

Professor Handsley, who will speak at a conference in Melbourne next month, titled The Corporate Takeover of Childhood, said consumer law, backed by a regulator, would put greater onus on the industry.