Official Report 122KB pdf
Good morning and welcome to the first meeting of the Equal Opportunities Committee in 2009. I wish everyone a happy new year, and hope that it will be a good one for you.
We have not much substantive evidence on which to base recommendations or actions. It would be a little bit contentious—to say the least—to make a decision without such evidence, so if we do anything to progress the issue, it should be in respect of the research agenda.
We need much more research, although I think there is some evidence that the goods we are talking about not only sexualise children, but harm them—boys and girls—and society. Research should be done.
That is a fair point. The retailers made a fairly detailed submission, but concluded that the matter is nothing to do with them. As Sandra White says, perhaps research is what is needed first. We could then revisit the question about where the retailers fit in.
The paper is very useful. It is helpful to bring together all that has happened.
Research would be necessary to establish whether there is an issue in the first place, and to provide empirical evidence.
I am sure that SPICe will be able to clarify this, but if we agree that the committee is going to commission research, we will have to be clear that the research must meet the ethical standards that we expect of, for example, a research project in a university, so that we do not fall foul of problems related to talking to young children and interviewing techniques. We must also consider whether we want qualitative or quantitative research. There are a variety of issues around conducting research, but I am particularly concerned that we remain aware that there are ethical standards that we must set in relation to how such research is conducted.
I am at a slight disadvantage as I was not at the round-table discussion, but I have given the issue quite a lot of thought.
The round-table discussion broadened out our consideration of the issue in a way that I had not expected, even though I had studied the papers extremely thoroughly. The points that witnesses made took us in all sorts of different directions. Reference was made to how the Australian Parliament approaches the issue: there, it is viewed as a community issue rather than one for the Government to take the lead on.
Malcolm Chisholm made a good argument for going ahead with research and investigating the issue. He is right that the subject of sexualised goods feeds into stereotyping and sexual violence and that it affects how people view women and gender. Regardless of whether the relevant powers are reserved or devolved, we are talking about an issue that affects the society that we live in. Given that we are products of that society, it is incumbent on the Equal Opportunities Committee to consider ways of improving it. I believe that research on sexualised goods in terms of how people are perceived and treated would help to do that.
The part of the round-table discussion that I attended was extremely interesting. Even if the committee does nothing else, that discussion helped to inform people and served as a rebuke to those who might want to dismiss the importance of such matters.
Johann Lamont has raised a number of issues. We want to know whether sexualised goods are a subject that the Government has already looked into. Before we held the round-table discussion, we considered the topic and produced a paper in order to identify whether the demand existed for such an event. We went ahead with it and were all highly impressed with what came out of it, which alerted us to the fact that sexualised goods seem to be an issue.
On Sandra White's point about the age of children from whom we could seek views, the paper suggests that we could speak to teenagers rather than to younger children, which we recognise raises difficult issues. That was Tom Narducci's point. Some of the other participants in the round-table discussion thought that it would be possible to take views from teenagers, as the paper says. If the committee decided to commission research, potential bidders could be asked to suggest how they would do such work in a properly ethical way, which brings me on to Hugh O'Donnell's point about the ethical basis of such research. Through the research specification and our evaluation of tenders, we would expect bidders to prove that they would do the research properly.
The main devolved areas of activity would be to do with raising awareness of public concern and education.
Yes—but if we think of devolved areas as being those on which Parliament has legislative powers, sexualised goods might not be an area on which the committee would seek legislation.
We appreciate that.
That would broaden the agenda.
You mentioned teenagers. Are you saying that we should seek the views of young people aged 13?
Yes—they should probably be 12 or 13 and upwards.
When you referred to teenagers, were you talking specifically about 13-year-olds?
I did not mean children of that specific age; I just meant that they should not be young children—in other words, children who are younger than 10 or 11. I do not have a particular age in mind. It can be difficult to specify an age.
On Johann Lamont's question, are you aware of any work that the Government is doing in this area?
I am not aware that the Government is doing any such work, although I have not spoken to the equality unit about the proposal in question. I would certainly do that, if the committee was minded to ask me to do so.
If the Scottish Government wanted to take up the task of doing the research, that would be fine and would mean that it was on board, but I thought that the research findings would pull the Government on board, rather than vice versa. What would the timescale be? I presume that we would have time to find out whether anyone else was doing such work—although my understanding from the round-table discussion is that no such research is being done in the United Kingdom.
I think some work has been done abroad.
Some work has been done, but it has tended to be about children's access to adult material, particularly on the internet, which has been examined in a lot more depth. Consumerism and children is a separate issue, but it is about consumerism in general rather than just sexualised consumerism. Work has been and is being done on those areas, but I have not come across any work in the UK on the sexualisation of products that are aimed at children.
Work on such targeting would be new and ground breaking.
And the timescale?
If the committee decided today that it wanted to go ahead, I would need to work up a proposal paper that went into the research in a bit more detail. That would need to be approved by the committee, either at a meeting or by correspondence, and by the Conveners Group. We would then start the tendering process, which would take about four to six weeks to give people a month or so to reply and to work up their bids. We would probably be in a position to issue a contract in March. From the scale of what is suggested in the paper it looks like a six-month project, which would report in the autumn. That is a rough timescale—it would depend on the bids and could change.
If we commissioned research, it would be done externally and we would wait for the report to come out in the autumn. It would not involve any work for the committee in the interim period, and we would just consider the report when it came back.
That is correct.
I have two questions. The first relates to the extent to which there is public concern about the issue. That should be established. My constituency mailbag has not been jammed with letters expressing such concern so, as part of the research, we need to find out the extent to which the committee is hyping up the problem. My second question is a bit more mundane but is equally important. How much are we talking about spending?
On the extent of public concern, one of the suggestions for the research is to hold focus groups with parents—it is important to get their views, for example on whether sexual imagery in goods aimed at children is a concern for them. When I prepared the previous paper for SPICe, a lot of the information was based on media reports, blogs and so on, but what came up at the round-table discussion was that a lot of that is anecdotal. If some focus groups are commissioned, they might be able to tease out more detail about the nature of parents' concerns.
In addition to parents, would youth groups be contacted? Following the round-table discussion, I received an e-mail from the YMCA, which had done research in Paisley and Perth on academic achievement among males and females. It found that, to begin with, females tend to be ahead of the game but fall back a bit when they become more concerned about their image, and the discussion had begun to focus on why image should affect females' confidence in their ability to perform. There is a lot of good evidence that the committee can pass on to you. It was encouraging to find that another group was on the same wavelength as the round-table discussion in so far as it was able to come up with concrete examples of how the issue is playing out.
One way to talk to teenagers might be to go through youth groups. However, if you mean talking to a representative body, I do not know whether we would need to do a focus group with children's organisations and youth groups or whether they could come to the committee and give evidence. If, after the research is complete, the committee decided that it wanted to have an event, you could perhaps involve non-governmental organisations, youth groups and so on at that point.
And the issue of cost?
The annual budget for external research for all committees is about £160,000—that gives you an idea of the scale of the projects that the committees commission. I am hesitant about discussing the cost because we do not give a guide price in our commissioning process. As this is a public session, if I were to suggest to the committee what the cost might be, it would be like giving a guide price. I cannot really do that in public.
Send it to me later in a sealed envelope.
An estimated cost would be in the paper that went to the Conveners Group.
Another research project that we discussed was knocked back on the ground of cost, so I would like to see the cost of this research project before we put it to the Conveners Group. I appreciate Camilla Kidner's problem—I am not criticising her—but cost was a significant factor in the rejection of a previous project.
It would be more accurate to say that, although cost may have been a factor in the discussion in private session on the item to which you refer, there were other reasons why the committee decided on another course of action.
As I recall, the major reason given was cost, so we should know the cost of this project before we put it before the Conveners Group.
That is fine but, to set the record straight, I should say that there were other reasons why we decided on another course of action for that item.
During the round-table discussion, there was a debate about whether there had been an increase in the prevalence of sexual imagery in goods aimed at children, which raises the issue of how you might get a baseline. One element of the research could be to consider what information was available about a previous time—you would have to choose a particular year, say 10 or 20 years ago. However, that would not be straightforward because you would need to consider the general change in culture and the huge changes in the media over the past 10 or 20 years, and to disentangle those issues from what you found in your research into products and advertising now and then. That element would add a considerable amount of work to the overall research project, and the committee would need to think carefully about whether to include it in the research baseline.
Could such research realistically go back as far as 20 years?
I do not know. I am not an expert on researching advertising history, and I am not sure what archives and databases exist for such research. The bigger issue is how you would disentangle general changes in culture over the time period you were talking about.
We have three options in front of us. If we went down the research route, would you come back to us with a paper for approval?
Yes. I would do a proposal paper on the research project, which would need to be approved by the committee.
Given the caveats and opinions that we have heard, are members content to ask Camilla Kidner to come back with that paper and for us to take our final decision then?
Given the point that Bill Wilson and I raised, could we have that discussion in private? We would then have access to the potential cost of the project. I am not asking for a definite answer now.
The discussion on costs could be separate. We can consider whether any further discussion on that is needed.
As I said, I do not really support the project. However, if it goes ahead, it should be built into the remit that it is being done from an equalities perspective. I am concerned about how we disentangle people's attitudes to equalities from people's attitudes to sex. We are not trying to go back to Victorian attitudes to sex, and we must not base the research on the idea that we cannot have any sexual discussions. Pop music is a good example. Some might say, "We don't think children should be exposed to pop songs because they're ultimately all about sex," which would be absurd. The focus should be on equalities rather than the absurd idea that children and sex should be kept apart.
That point is well made. The point is also emphasised in paragraph 9 of the paper, which states:
The point that was made in the round-table discussion is that we need to tackle the inappropriate sexualisation of goods for children, which is quite a different issue. We are definitely not being Victorian in our attitudes.
Accepting that the cost factor will be discussed in private, are we content to ask Camilla Kidner to work up a paper on commissioning research, which we can then discuss before giving the final go-ahead?
Are we content to leave the other two options until we see that paper and move on from there?
As agreed at a previous meeting, we will consider our next item, which is draft guidance on how committees can mainstream equal opportunities in their work, in private. We will wait for the public gallery to clear.
Meeting continued in private until 11:17.