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MEDIA STANDARDS ARCHIVES
PLEA TO STOP CANNIBAL CORPSE TOUR (August 2006).
RAUNCHY LYRICS INFLUENCE TEEN SEX. (August 2006).
BIG BROTHER "UNCUT" CUT SHORT. (June 2006).
INTERNET PORN FILTER PACKAGE ANNOUNCED. (June 2006).
MORE: Media Standards Archives
Plea to Stop ‘Cannibal Corpse’ Tour
(August 2006)
Media Standards Australia has made a direct plea to WA Premier Alan Carpenter asking him to personally intervene to stop a concert tour of WA by extreme rock band “Cannibal Corpse” whose graphic song lyrics glorify the brutal rape, torture and murder of women and children.
This band plans to play in Perth in October – at around the same time as the trial of Perth child molester and murderer Dante Arthurs whose crime shocked WA just a few months ago. Dante is to face WA courts for raping and murdering 8year old Sophia Rodriguez in a Perth shopping centre toilet. Sophia was found by her 14 year old brother after only a few minutes away from her family. She had been stripped, raped and strangled to death.
Cannibal Corpses songs include one entitled “Stripped, Raped and Strangled” which glorifies the violent murder of a girl in a way similar to that of Sophia Rodriguez. Numerous other songs by this band (whose lyrics are almost all too graphically violent to publish on this site) also glorify the rape, torture, mutilation, murder and post mortem desecration of women and children.
We feel that it is totally inappropriate to allow this band to promote such offensive music lyrics to WA youth, especially at the same time as the trial of the murderer of Sophia Rodriguez.
The song lyrics of this band portray the brutal abuse of women and children as erotically gratifying to the young men who are the main targets of this music. This is NOT the sort of callous and perverse portrayal of women and children the vast majority of Australians are prepared to tolerate in the name of freedom of expression. Women and children have a right to feel safe and valued in our community – our political leadership must act to stop groups who promote and incite such violence and abuse against them.
Raunchy Lyrics Influence Teen Sex.
(August 2006)
Teens who listen to music with raunchy sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a US study by Rand Corp researcher, Steven Martino has found.
"Boys learned they should be relentless in pursuit of women, and girls learned to view themselves as sex objects" he said.
"We think that really lowers kids' inhibitions and makes them less thoughtful" about sexual decisions".
The study found that teens who listen to a lot of sexually explicit music were much more likely to start having sex within the next 2 years than teens who listen to little explicit music. Early initiation of sexual activity amongst teens carries significant risks to health and wellbeing.
Big Brother "Uncut" Cut Short.
(June 2006)
Channel Ten has announced that it will end the “adults only” Big Brother show earlier than first planned due to continued community complaints about the shows bad language and the degrading sexual behaviour of the housemates.
A number of MPs responded to community complaints and raised the issue of the programmes’ gratuitous and vulgar content in Parliament, questioning whether this complied with the Television Industry Code of Practice. The Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice states in Section 5.2 that “ a program or program segment will not be acceptable where the subject matter serves largely or wholly as a vehicle for gratuitous, exploitative or demeaning portrayal of sexual behaviour or nudity”.
As “a vehicle for gratuitous, exploitative and demeaning portrayal of sexual behaviour and nudity” pretty much exactly describes “Big Brother – Adults Only” it is not difficult to see why Channel Ten were under pressure to axe it!
In this instance at least, it seems that community members’ efforts to express their concerns about poor standards in the media can sometimes have an effect. Pity it took Channel Ten so long to comply with the community standards they claim their Code of Practice represents and upholds.
Internet Porn Filter Package Announced.
(June 2006)
Communications Minister Helen Coonan recently announced the introduction of a National Filter Scheme, which will provide free software that blocks access to pornography to all Australian Internet users.
The programme will cost $93 million to implement and will be accompanied by an $18-million national education drive to encourage families, businesses and organisations such as public libraries to take up the filters. Ms Coonan described this package as “the single biggest commitment to protecting families online in the history of the internet in Australia” and said it showed that “we are deadly serious about protecting Australian children and families."
Whereas this announcement may seem like a win for Australian families it remains to be seen whether this package will be very effective in achieving the goal of protecting families from the effects of internet porn - either online or in the wider community context.
This move does not include any real incentives for the Internet industry to take responsibility for the porn-and-violence saturated service it routinely feeds into the community. The responsibility for stemming that putrid tide has been shunted (yet again) onto harassed and weary parents.
According to the Internet industry and civil liberties groups it is primarily parents responsibility to prevent our children being exposed to porn on the internet. The Internet industry has repeatedly pushed the argument that it is not it’s responsibility to censor Internet content. Any reasoning parent who has the audacity to ask the obvious question why this degrading filth can’t be stopped at source by the Internet Service Providers conveying it (as MSA’s Internet Child Protection Petition does) is given a load of questionable technical excuses and lambasted as “pro-censorship” – a crime synonymous with being that other scary bogeyman, a “fundamentalist” according to anti-censorship groups.
With this latest proposal, the Government seems to have buckled in the face of industry resistance to ISP filtering. Yet again, parents are told that WE have to install the filters, WE have to protect and watch our kids vigilantly at all times in an environment saturated with violent and pornographic media – because the industries feeding these images into our homes in the first place WILL not act responsibly. And no doubt if our innocent kids minds are assaulted by grotesquely perverse sexual images or (worse) their vulnerable little bodies are sexually assaulted by some damaged individual looking to act out the warped porn images he/she has been viewing on the internet, WE are expected to pick up the pieces of our kids lives and ‘educate’ them to deal with this supposedly inescapable modern reality.
Meanwhile, it will no doubt continue to be business as usual for the multi-billion dollar, international porn industry, aided and abetted by the Internet Industry in Australia. Some parents may install these free filters to stop porn viewing on their home computer, but will your child’s teachers, babysitters, daycare workers, sports coaches, next door neighbours………………??