At it’s best, there is nothing that compares to the brilliance that is radio. Working in radio was my first proper job, and despite moving into new media eight years ago I remain a total radio enthusiast. Not in the taking-photos-of-transmitters-and-collecting-jingles variety, but of the fact that radio, above all other mediums, can totally immerse you in an environment or experience. Programmes like From Our Own Correspondent or Simon Mayo or my friend Marsha’s excellent podcast interviews with comedians (I particularly recommend her chats with Andre Vincent and Micky Flanagan) all are ways that stories are told simply and powerfully.
It also appears that at its worse radio can be horrific. I still find it incredible that the biggest media story of last year involved a late night radio programme. However, the Ross/Brand affair is nothing compared to what happened in Australia, where two days ago an even more incredible example of when-radio-goes-bad was broadcast. The Kyle and Jackie O breakfast show, on 2Day FM, ran a competition where a mother made her 14-year-old daughter undertake a lie-detection test live on air. After some questions about whether she had bunked off school, she is asked whether she had ever had sex. A clearly distressed girl admits she had been raped when she 12. It is horrible car-crash audio.
From a radio producers point of view, I struggle to understand how such a stunt could have been allowed to go on air. The presenters have tried to defend their actions, claiming that’s one of the pitfalls of live radio, but I can not comprehend how they or their producers even let the competition go ahead, let alone allow the mum to ask her daughter about her sexual experience (even if they had no idea the answer would be what it was). Apparently their jobs are not under threat, despite Australian PM Kevin Rudd joining the chorus of criticism [Update. On Sunday 2nd August, Austereo, owners of 2Day FM, announced that Kyle and Jackie O would be suspended indefinitely as a result of this broadcast.].
Throughout the interview, you get the very real feeling that the daughter doesn’t appear to be a willing participant in the whole saga. Personally, I think there are huge questions the station has to ask about putting participants on air when they actively don’t want to be there; but perhaps the focus needs to be on the mother, who as one commentator described it was willing to “prostitute her daughter for a couple of free concert tickets.” As the daughter says after she admits the rape, and the mother concedes she knew about it, “yet you still asked me the question?”.
And that’s the real horror of this story. Yes the radio station was in the wrong, but it is the mother that really has questions to answer. What kind of parent would put their child through such an ordeal?
Sadly, it’s not the first time that such a thing has happened. A couple of years ago, an six-year old girl in the US had her prize revoked after she had made up a story about her dad being killed in Iraq so she could get some Hannah Montana tickets. Yet it was her mother who made the lies up, saying “We did whatever we could do to win.”
Let’s not forget the parents of Alfie Patten, who were quite happy to sell their son’s “young father” story to the tabloids despite the fact that he wasn’t the father and they should actually have been supporting him rather than running off to the papers.
And for the really sick parents, you need to look no further than the story of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who committed suicide after an online ‘friend’ turned nasty on her. It turned out that the ‘friend’ was the mother of one of her real friends who wanted to find out what Megan really thought of her daughter. Lori Drew, the mother, was eventually found not-guilty because there was no law in place to cover such action.
None of these stories are anything other than individual examples of where parents go wrong. The vast majority of parents understand their obligations to their children; and would never dream of doing anything like the parents above. And yet, a small minority let them all down.
Isn’t that what they say about teenagers?
PS. I wrote something very similar a couple of years ago on YPulse.
Image courtesy of aloshbennett. Used under licence.
There’s been quite a lot of discussion over the last couple of weeks about the decision to allow BTCV and the Wildlife Trust to run a programme of volunteering for young people in London to regain their free travel passes.
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone introduced a radical scheme that allowed every young person under 16 the right to free transport on the capital’s buses. It was widely heralded as a positive step in order to tackle social exclusion, on the simple premise that if young people couldn’t get to places they couldn’t participate.
Young people who’ve caused anti-social behaviour, and other offences, have had their passes taken away (which in itself has led to discussions about whether that is the correct punishment). In order to get them back, they need to undertake a period of volunteering with the above charities, as outlined last week.
It’s just another example of the increasing stretching of the term volunteering, particularly by government, to fit a whole host of programmes and projects. I may be a volunteering purist, but I get worried that too many initiatives are muddling volunteering with participation, work experience or community service.
Volunteering obviously comes from the word “voluntary”, which means optional. If you are asked to make a voluntary contribution, you can decide not to give. If you are asked to volunteer some information about yourself, you can choose not to. All this makes a mockery of both the government and opposition proposals for compulsory volunteering.
But volunteering isn’t just about making a choice to do something. My favourite definition of volunteering is “philanthropy of your time”. The great 19th-century philanthropists (and today’s philanthropists) didn’t donate their money for personal gain, but because they believed in the greater good. The libraries, art galleries, hospitals and trusts that enriched public life in this country came about because those people understood the basic principles of social return on investment.
And that’s why some schemes appear to be betraying the concept of volunteering on two related fronts. Firstly, whilst I’d never deny the right of volunteers to use their volunteering to develop skills and gain experience, nor that people should be stopped from volunteering because they want to improve their CV, I get particularly worried when volunteering is promoted as primarily about skills development and increasing job prospects. Hospital radio has always been the way budding DJs got to practice their ‘art’, but certainly at my hospital radio station it was always made clear that you were there to serve the patients; the skills you developed were a by-product. Volunteering is not simply about personal gain.
Which is my second point – volunteering is about doing something that makes a positive difference for someone else (or at least something else, in the case of environmental volunteering). That’s why I get a bit nervous by things like the National Talent Bank that appear to be about promoting volunteering without a single mention that volunteering is a means to an end; not the end in itself. Even v appears to be about counting the number of volunteers placed rather than the effect those volunteers can have.
And if I could have a third point, it would be that volunteering has to involve a sacrifice. I’m all for new ways of volunteering, including current thoughts around micro-volunteering, but I’d get slightly worried if you could count yourself as a volunteer because you had re-tweeted a message on Twitter. That’s akin to counting yourself a philanthropist because you dropped your 1p of spare change into a collecting tin.
Does this matter? Well, I think so. Five or so years ago, before the current rush to push volunteering, lots of people (including young people) engaged in positive volunteering opportunities because they believed in the cause and wanted to make a difference. I certainly don’t want to rubbish the new initiatives that have tried to engage new people into volunteering, but we need to be careful we don’t lose or de-value that level of volunteering, or muddle good citizenship (participation) with the extra effort required for an activity to be counted as volunteering. Because, if a young person who helps run a Brownie night every week is compared equally with a young person who once spent an afternoon in a recording studio making a music track, we’re in danger of losing the real value of volunteering. And that is the effect it has on others.
So what do I think should have been done to give back travel passes to young people? Well, my suggestion would have been the creation of young people’s courts, to introduce the principle of being judged by peers. Part of what the “jury” would look at was what pro-social activities the young person had been involved in. That could include volunteering, but it wouldn’t make the direct connection between volunteering and returning the pass. And the jury should of course focus on the effect that the volunteering had.
Posted in media, politics by Olly Benson
July 22, 2009
My second post in as many weeks based on what I saw on Question Time. This week, despite being a ‘regular’ programme, it had a very much end-of-term feel about it.
Margot James, vice-chair of the Conservative Party and a prospective parliamentary candidate had some difficulty defending as a serious proposal an earlier announcement that young people who committed anti-social behaviour would have their mobile phones taken away. The audience and other panel members rubbished the idea, likening it Tony Blair’s much lamented suggestion that yobs could be made to pay on-the-spot fines by marching them to the nearest cash machine.
But one question led me to think about the relationship that young people have with their mobiles, and how it differs from older people. An audience member asked “Won’t they just replace the phone?”. Yes they might, said Margot, but they won’t have their sim card. Now, with the obvious caveat that this is not a definite rule, most of the young people I’ve dealt with are on pay-as-you-go, and it’s not just devices that are replaced regularly. The sim card, effectively the number and the contacts contained on it, has no value to them beyond the credit it has on it.
I’m old enough to be of the generation where you’d answer your home phone with your number “Hello, Bedford 55122*” (I’ve never quite understood why we all did that). 25-years-on, I can still remember one of my neighbour’s number, and if I thought about it hard enough probably another couple of numbers as well. And yet, I can only remember three mobile numbers; and they pretty much the first friends I knew who had mobiles.
Mobiles allow you can store numbers by name in your phone, in a way you never really did with landlines (you could set preset buttons, but it was often limited to 10 numbers). You also don’t have the problem of remembering the number when you are away from your house. Therefore, once you’ve programmed the number in, you don’t have to ever worry what it is. With mobiles, you often swap numbers by allowing others to type it in to your contacts, or text you. You may never actually look at the number. And increasingly, mobiles are integrating with services such as Gmail or Facebook so your friends’ details automatically drop into the address book.
I’ve had the same mobile number since I first got a phone in 1997, and when I changed network I took my old number with me. But actually that’s a fairly irrational choice to make; although I’ve got friends (and family!) who have known me since that time, the vast majority of calls/texts I get on my mobile are from colleagues or people who I’ve seen within the last month. It wouldn’t be that difficult for them to get my updated number. In the same period I’ve been through five primary personal email addresses (and three work ones), and although there may be people I’ve lost contact with as a result, they wouldn’t have any trouble finding me again if they needed to.
So apart from the obvious practical issues of removing a mobile, unless it was going to be illegal to have a mobile during that time, I can’t see how confiscation would be in any way effective.
On Thursday the BBC broadcast one of my favourite programmes of the year, Schools Question Time. It’s the annual edition of the regular Question Time but with a distinctly youth flavour: produced by student winners of a competition; a young audience; and for the third year running a “young person” on the panel. Because I was out on Thursday evening, I’ve only just got around to watching it.
For whatever reason, this year’s programme felt significantly more small-c conservative than previous editions. The audience definitely was older than before*, and the panellists, with the exception of 18-year-old Suzanne Burlton, could have been on any edition of the programme. And whilst all credit to Suzanne for her ability to participate in the discussion, I couldn’t help thinking she was a fairly predictable wannabe-politician and brought little to the table that wouldn’t have been said by someone twice her age. It’s a theme similar to my previous two posts, we need to engage young people on their level: not dress them up in suits and tell them to act like grown-ups.
Even the comments from the audience seemed a lot more restrained than other years, and certainly they seemed less vocal than we’ve seen on the programme over the last few months. A young person who suggested that others turn to drink because there was nothing for them to do on a Friday night was rebuked with the suggestion she should read a book. (Meanwhile a friend on Twitter said “they have the internet now FFS!” – I can’t quite work out whether he was joking).
Where was anyone, in the audience or on the panel, championing the right for young people to hang-out with each other on a Friday night? With the exception of one audience member, there seemed little support for the idea that young people might actually want places to go on Friday night and the weekend, and pointing out that if there isn’t the provision of suitable activities then they’ll create their own. There are moves to increase weekend opening of statutory youth clubs, but it’s still sketchy as best and there is plenty of resistance to the idea. And yet we know that young people respond positively to having activities to do – it’s often that there aren’t the adults to support them.
All this said, I still like the fact that we have this programme and would love to be invited to work on the show (or be in the audience one time).
On a related note, I was glad to see that John Bercow, the recently-appointed speaker of the House of Commons, stepped in to reverse a decision made by Commons authorities to prevent Cub Scouts being able to lobby their MPs because they were not old enough to vote. Luckily most MPs appear to have thought this was a patently absurd decision, but you do have to wonder how anyone reached that decision in the first place.
* it’s worth pointing out that reading up on how the programme is put together, I think the young producers can choose the age of the audience as well as the panellists.
Photo, showing David Dimbleby at another Schools Question Time event, courtesy of eyedropper. Used under licence.
Sorry, I haven’t blogged for a while, primarily because my new job (details) that kind of took over the last couple of weeks (plus my birthday).
During that time, two interesting new pieces of news broke. Firstly the report of the Youth Citizenship Commission, and secondly the launch of The Youth of Today, the butterfly that resulted from the caterpillar that was the National Body for Youth Leadership.
I’ve been wanting to blog about the Youth Citizenship Commission since it reported the Friday before last, but having seen the reaction from others it doesn’t exactly set the world alight. Perhaps I should at least read the whole report prior to writing about it, but if the press release is anything to go by I can’t exactly imagine it being a riveting read.
Yes, there are some interesting nuggets of ideas, including keeping schools open when polling is going on and proper funding of UKYP, but essentially it boiled down to revealing that young people felt disengaged with politics and that there needed to be better citizenship education in schools. Hardly earth shattering.
What was even more disappointing was its stance on Votes at 16. Personally I’m in favour of a reduction of the voting age, although I don’t actually think it’s the number one priority and I understand there are quite reasonable arguments against reducing it. So what annoyed me the most about the commission’s finding was that they didn’t come to a conclusion. If the Government of the day produces a Green Paper, asks a commission to investigate various elements of it, it doesn’t really want it to come back going “erm, we don’t really know – make your own mind up.” That’s a bit like a forensic scientist saying “well, what do you think happened?”.
And, once again, I see mandatory volunteering being bandied about: this time for Key Stage 4 pupils. I’m all for using lesson time to allow young people to help in their community (I used to help out at a local school instead of do PE), but I really worry when I see words like compulsory being thrown into the mix. Before it becomes compulsory, someone has to at least answer the concern that it could alienate a generation of future volunteers.
Perhaps what is most depressing though is that I can’t help feeling somewhat cynical that the much more radical Power Inquiry came up with far more exciting solutions to these problems, yet it faded into nothing. What is the point of these inquiries if change doesn’t come about from them?
The Youth of Today looks a more promising proposition. I’ve already blogged about it when the original proposal was announced, and I still really hope it is a catalyst for recognising the importance of developing young leaders. But, as other commentators have pointed out, my reaction was that it seems a bit too heavy on the institutionalised mandate: leadership appears to be about MPs, councillors and similar elected bodies. I realise there are other schemes that promote innovation and individual excellence, but I’d hope the Youth of Today takes a broader, more grassroots approach to what leadership is. With the exception of our friend in the States, I struggle to think of many politicians who really fit my idea of what good leadership is. And not all young leaders get excited by the prospect of a trip to the Houses of Parliament.
As an example of what I mean, I’ve been party to conversations about the Young Achievers Awards, an independent charity that seeks to recognise inspirational youth volunteers (colleagues of mine are trustees for the charity). Young Achievers Awards are presented to people like Ryan Hartson, a 23-year-old from Rotherham, who was described by his MV co-ordinator as “an all round mentor and role model to literally hundreds of young people.” Ryan initially helped and then ran dance lessons, before organising a Battle of the Bounce competition that attracted over 200 young people. He’s gone into schools to talk about his work, not bad for someone who had to deal with bullies when he was younger due to a speech impediment.
As part of his prize for winning a Young Achievers Award, Ryan met with Jonzi D, artistic director of Breakin’ Convention (an international festival of hip hop dance). As a result of that meeting, Ryan was invited to audition for this year’s convention in Nottingham. His company was successful, and got the opportunity to perform with some of the biggest names in hip hop theatre. They’ve also performed in Bradford as part of the Breakin’ Convention there, as you can see:
Apart from being a great opportunity for Ryan, what was brilliant was the feedback from the Breakin’ Convention, which included him being described as “very organised and a complete joy to have on our stage.” To me, Ryan absolutely symbolises what a young leader should be about, and exactly the sort of person that The Youth of Today should be championing.
Incidentally, you might like to know that this year’s Young Achievers Awards are now open. You’ve got until the 27th September to nominate a suitable young person.
