Prioritising the protection of children in Hollywood with Safeguarding Practitioner Hannah Bardsley

Growing up with Disney Channel is my first point of reference for that.

You know, these children were sometimes nine or 10 up through to 18.

You know, the first point of call of marketing and advertising their show, and it, and it works.

You know, they're the face of the show.

Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus is the face of her show.

It makes sense that she markets it, you know, from a strategic point of view.

But from a safeguarding point of view, it should be the opposite, and that's your point, and that's our Bad Apple today.

But why have we allowed it? Why is it normal?

Well, I think...

Sorry if I've interrupted you.

There's a slight delay.

But, um, it, it's really interesting when we look through the history of film and TV, um, you, you can sort of see the natural progression to where we are now.

So if you start off with silent films, you start off with Shirley Temple, for instance, uh, the eight-year-old golden ringletted girl in America who produced film after film.

Um, and when you watch these films back, it's, it's really disturbing how deeply sexualized these films are around a little girl.

They've been made for public consumption, but they are still inappropriate in a way that if you were looking for something inappropriate and you wanted that, they're there.

You know, lots of her sitting on grown men's laps singing songs sweetly to men.

And then within that, there becomes this, this consumerism.

I mean, if you think about the fact that we have Shirley Temple's Cocktail that you can get, you l- there's literally this act of consuming and using her to sell.

And there's, I think there's two things, and this is, this is the really interesting thing for us to explore as public and as consumers, is that there's both the fact that we just actually really like to celebrate someone who we really like.

So with the case of Shirley Temple, she became a national, international figure, and everyone enjoys that, and they share in that together.

So products that revolve around her, people kind of, they're naturally drawn to that from that shared experience.

Um, but then on top of that, you have the much more questionable side of things, the sort of the s- the sleazy side of things.

I mean, capitalism, wherever you are, when there's a product to sell, it's gonna try bringing a product to sell.

Um, and there's that too.

And you can sort of, you can take that, you move on next to Judy Garland, um, and just how she was used to sell so much as well, and that led to her downfall.