Sunday May 29, 2005
The
Observer
It is not often the august agencies of Her Majesty's government have to bother themselves with the heavy-petting antics of ITV's Celebrity Love Island. But maybe they should.
Sexually graphic reality shows featuring bed-hopping contestants are hampering the drive against teenage pregnancy, a key adviser on sexual health warns today.
Programmes such as Celebrity Love Island - in which scantily clad couples are closeted in a tropical 'love shack' in the hope that temptation will get the better of them - or Big Brother, with its cameras trained beneath the duvet, send teens the message that everyone else is having sex.
Writing in today's Observer, Jan Barlow, chief executive of the Brook Advisory Centre, warns parents that teenage pregnancies cannot be tackled without looking at 'the broader social climate', including media influence. 'Just because these programmes are on after the watershed doesn't mean your 10-year-old won't hear about them in the play ground.' Her words follow the furore last week over three teenage sisters who each conceived under the age of 16. Mother Julie Atkins blamed the pregnancies of Jemma, 14, Jade, 15, and Natasha, 18, on a lack of sex education at school. Children's minister Beverly Hughes then intervened, warning that the onus was on parents to reduce pregnancy rates.
Barlow, who sits on the government's Teenage Pregnancy Advisory Group, says that the impact on teens of overtly sexual images must be recognised. 'Everyone watching [these programmes] is saying, are these people going to have sex on TV or aren't they?' she told The Observer. '[It's as if] it's OK to be like that but it's not OK to talk to young people about what they need to do to protect themselves. You end up with generations of young people for whom this is the norm. I don't think we can ignore that.'
It was not for a family planning advice centre to judge TV programmes, but 'if we're happy to live in a society where these sexual images are out there, we can't have young people cut adrift not knowing the first thing about contraception and infection'.
Better sex and relationships education would help teenagers realise such shows were not about real life, she said.
Graham Allen, the Labour MP whose Nottingham North constituency has high rates of teenage pregnancy, said that politicians must help parents to fulfil their responsibilities. 'This is tripe that's on TV and, yes, it is undermining some of the efforts - although it is not an excuse for government not to do the right thing in terms of having a really coherent strategy,' he said.
However a spokesman for Celebrity Love Island, whose contestants include David Beckham's kiss-and-tell PA Rebecca Loos, insisted it was not about sex: 'It's about creating the perfect couple. Our aim isn't to show people having sex or to encourage it. It's to create love.'
The latest series of Big Brother, which began on Friday, also focuses on the possibility of sex: one contestant arrived in a PVC nurse's outfit, while the bedroom features heat-seeking cameras to capture activity under the duvet, and too few beds to accommodate all the contestants. Channel Four declined to comment.
