NSPCC criticised
Posted by News Editor
Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Posted 23rd January 2004

An  interesting article written by Frank Ferudi

.... The NSPCC is shameless about its obsession with publicity. Its website proudly displays the logo 'PR Week Award 2003'. A press release published in December 2003 boasts that its 'hard-hitting' cartoon TV and poster campaign gained an award for being 'the best charity ad in the world'. These ads featured a child in the form of a cartoon character who is thrown from wall to wall by a real live father. Viewers see the 'child' having a cigarette stubbed out on his head, being punched and then thrown down the stairs. Another ad portrays images of distraught cartoon babies covering their ears in terror to keep out the noise of their father battering their mother next door. The NSPCC's publicity crusade relentlessly portrays a world where parents, particularly fathers, systematically brutalise their children.

In 2003, slick adverts made by Saatchi and Saatchi compared a baby's scream to a road drill and depicted a father slowly losing his temper to the point where he rushes towards his child. The message is crystal clear - fathers can't handle a toddler's tantrums without reacting violently.

While the NSPCC is brilliant at self-promotion, its research verges on the banal. Today, it launches new 'research' in order to promote its 'Someone To Turn To' campaign. Ostensibly, the aim of this campaign is to get children to talk to people about their anxieties. However, its real objective is to target children and to get them to communicate their family problems and parental misdeeds to disinterested lobby groups like the NSPCC.

Why should this be necessary? Because the NSPCC research 'shows' that children are anxious about their life and also worry a lot. If you read the NSPCC' s advocacy research, you can discover that 34 per cent of 11- to 16-year-old children go so far as 'to say that they are always worrying about something'. And apparently, surprise, surprise, 82 per cent of 11- to 16-year-olds worry about exams and 42 per cent worry about not having a boyfriend or girlfriend....