Got this one from What About Our Daughters and wonder how they could get the message so wrong. In creating ads against statutory rape, these Milwaukee PSA posters clearly missed the mark - both in failing to understand that pedophiles are attracted to underdeveloped bodies and in perpetuating racialized differences.Notice the poster with the white child tells us explicitly how "wrong" it is to sexualize a little girl, but the poster with the black child tells us that "she may look like a woman," but her "brain" is not yet developed to think like a woman. Having already spent a whole month of Black Herstory and recently teaching on the subject of black women's images, I immediately recognize the hypersexualization implied in the "already grown" black woman-child plus the racist scientific arguments about our "underdeveloped" brains. See? Overdeveloped bodies, underdeveloped minds, all this PLUS some really creepy looking posters that miss the whole point of men who commit acts against underage girls. SMH.
4 comments:
Your point is well taken.
I also question whether this whole ad even has an audience. Are there really a lot of guys out there who need to be educated that it is wrong to look at 6-year-olds sexually? I think this is pretty common knowledge even to pedophiles themselves. I would fear that this kind of poster wouldn't do much more than make men attracted to 13-year-olds feel they aren't really that bad.
Okay, after looking at those bizarre ads for a few minutes, I think I've figured out the angle. Initially, I thought it was little girls with major cleavage in shiny dresses. Confusing.
Now I realize it's supposed to be women's bodies with young girls' faces attached to them. To say: It doesn't matter what their bodies look like - they are still children?
Weird. As you say, creepy. But what's also strange is that statutory rape typically means that the child is past puberty. So why use photos of girls who look like they are 10 years old?
Unless you're a pedophile (in which case, I DON'T think a PSA is going to stop you from molesting children), the little girl faces just make no sense. If they are trying to deter 20 year old malesg from having sex with 14 year old girls, (or 14 yr old girls from thinking it's okay to have sex with men) I don't get it.
That being said, one anonymous poster commented on this blog, about the ads:
The campaign is meant to get adult men's attention and make them feel creepy about targeting young teen girls for sex. Over 70% of the babies born to underage teen moms in Milwaukee are fathered by adult men 20 and over. The campaign was actually focus group tested among inner city teens and young men and older teen girls and got tremendous, almost universal response that not only would it reach young men with the message that having sex with underage teen girls is wrong, but that it would create the kind of dialog that isn't happening right now in the inner city on this subject (and that's needed).
So, who knows. Maybe this makes no sense to us because we are not men living in communities where sex with a girl who has reached puberty is considered normal. Now that I think about it, I did see this thing going on (sanctioned by the parents), but my parents moved our family away from those types of people.
After analyzing the ads I think I understand. The ad is not trying to show a little girl with an amazing body as if pedophiles are looking at the in that way. What it's trying to say is that if you're a man age 20 or older and you're looking at a 14 or 15 year old with a well developed body you should still be seeing them as a child. The face of the little girl on the body is supposed to represent the fact that this 14 or 15 year old is still just a little girl at heart regardless of what her body looks like. I think this makes sense because many girls these days in this age bracket has bodies that look like that bodies of 20 year old women. I think you're misinterpreting this ad to be targeting older men targeting young children, when it's not meant for that at all.
Milwaukee native/resident here just wanting to comment. The commenter h sofia cites brings up a valid statistic. I personally have not seen the ads displayed in public in the city, but I think they could be useful in conveying the right message if they were. There is a real combined mindset at work here with older males thinking it is ok to troll the strip for young girls and young girls (influenced partly by this society's culture) wanting to grow up and look grown up way to fast.
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