Young Media Australia Helpline Launch
Transcript of speeches - 2 July 2002

This transcript of the Young Media Australia Helpline Launch at the Museum of Sydney on Tuesday 2 July 2002 includes the following speeches:

• Barbara Biggins - opening
• Michael Ooms
• Barbara Biggins - thanks and introduction
• Steve Biddulph
• Barbara Biggins - thanks and introduction
• Senator Jeannie Ferris
• Barbara Biggins - closing

Barbara Biggins

Good morning. I’m Barbara Biggins, President of Young Media Australia, and I’d like to welcome you all to the launch of our new initiative, a national free-call parent media Helpline, which has been funded by the Commonwealth Government, Department of Family and Community Services, under their Stronger Families Initiative. I would like to acknowledge the presence here today of Senator Jeannie Ferris who is a senator for South Australia; Ms Elisabeth Taylor of the Commonwealth Family and Community Services Department; Ms Tracy Young, New South Wales Commissioner for Children and Young People; representatives of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the Royal Australasian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, and the Australian Division of General Practice; and other government and community representatives.

Today is a very exciting day for Young Media Australia. As a national community organisation, we have had as a major focus over many years the collection of information about the impact of media on children. It’s information that’s really important for parents to have these days and it’s information that very few have easy access to. The provision of funding by the Commonwealth for the establishment of the National Helpline, supported by a comprehensive website, now enables Young Media Australia to make that information freely available Australia wide. It’s a big and it’s a bold step forward for us, but I have to say it’s one that’s sorely needed by Australian parents. It’s a new area of parenting actually, dealing with the expanding media outlets. You know, you can ask your Mum how to change a nappy, but can you ask your Mum how to keep your child safe on the Internet? Probably not.

To help us launch the Helpline, we’ve asked three people whose life experiences or their professional interests have given them a great insight into the need for this service. The three people are Michael Ooms who’s come from Melbourne, Steve Biddulph from Northern New South Wales (just temporarily absent doing a radio interview; he’ll be back), and Senator Jeannie Ferris from Adelaide. Michael and Steve will each contribute by speaking for a few minutes and Jeannie will be doing the actual launch for us.

I’d like first of all to introduce Michael Ooms, and also to say a special welcome to the Ooms family, to Linda, Monique and Genevieve, and thank you for coming here today from Melbourne.

Michael describes himself as an ordinary family and working man, however two years ago he was forced into the public spotlight by a set of unusual circumstances. He’s got a very special story to tell and I’LL let him tell it. Thank you, Michael.

Michael Ooms

It was late August nearly three years ago when our daughter Genevieve was invited to attend a sleepover. She was ten years old. I dropped her off late Friday afternoon and was instructed to pick her up at about 10.00 a.m. the morning after. The next morning I went to pick her up. I waited for her at the front door. When she greeted me she looked extremely tired. She said that someone was locked in the top attic of the house and said that she had to go and free them. She then ran off. I called out to her but there was no reply. Another girl at the party said she would go and get her, then she did. A minute later Genevieve returned. She was upset and distressed. She insisted somebody was locked in the top attic. I asked another girl at the party as to what Genevieve was talking about. The girl said she did not know. I then said to Genevieve to get her pillow and get her gear in the car. I then said goodbye to the host mother who was then standing at the doorway. We both returned home.

After getting home, my wife Linda went to work and I took both Genevieve and my youngest daughter Monique to a nearby vineyard where I was working. We were at the vineyard where both girls played, exploring nearby bushland. After about an hour, Genevieve came up to me. She seemed confused and very tired. I told her to go to the car and have a rest while I pack up my survey equipment. We then returned home. Soon after arriving home, Genevieve started crying and saying that she was losing her mind. I said ‘What do you mean?’ She said ‘Daddy, something is happening in my mind and I feel scared’. She was crying and trembling. I knew something was wrong. I called my wife Linda who was still at work and told her something was wrong with Genevieve—she’s constantly crying and trembling and telling me that something is wrong with her mind. Linda returned home immediately.

Genevieve settled when Linda arrived home. We cancelled our planned trip to Luna Park that night. That upset Genevieve, as she was looking forward to riding the scenic railway. We then assured her that we would go to Luna Park as promised. This we did. At Luna Park, Genevieve seemed distant and confused. She was saying things that made no sense— pointed to things that weren’t there, giggling then crying. We returned home straightaway because we thought Genevieve was overtired and needed a good night’s sleep. During the drive home and throughout most of the night, Genevieve was talking to people who were not there, again laughing and crying. She wandered about the house most of the night claiming there were people in the house. She even called out to people who did not exist. At about 4.00 a.m. we finally got her to sleep.

When she woke up at about 7.00 a.m. she was totally confused, disorientated and alien to us. Fearing the worst, I took her immediately to Frankston Hospital. I knew something happened at the party and feared the worst. I feared that someone gave her drugs at the party or maybe she’d been molested. We were at the Emergency Section of Frankston Hospital where Genevieve underwent numerous blood tests and a brain scan. She was finally admitted to hospital at 6 p.m. I stayed with her until about midnight, when I had to return and pick up Linda and Monique from her parents’ place. Early the next morning Frankston Hospital informed us that Genevieve was to be immediately admitted to the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.

Things were going from bad to worse. At this stage Genevieve just stared at the ceiling of the hospital. Her expression was that of extreme fear and confusion. She kept on saying things that made no sense. Later that day we arrived at the Neurology Ward at the Royal Children’s Hospital. The tests began. They included brain scans, lumbar tap to check for any viral infections, and more blood tests. Her speech remained incomprehensible. She talked to people who weren’t there. She started talking about a mask. The mask caused her to tremble and cry. I then rang Genevieve’s teacher at her school and asked her if she could talk to another child in her class who attended the party to find out what happened at the sleepover. Later the teacher rang back and said that the children watched a horror movie called Scream.

The movie was about a murderer who wore a haunting white mask and stabbed people to death. All of a sudden things started to fall into place. The things that she was talking about that made no sense all of a sudden started to make sense. It was obvious that the horror video watched at the sleepover was causing extreme fear, trauma and psychosis. Counselling started immediately. Over the following days, Genevieve was counselled over the video and bit by bit she started confronting the deep fear that caused her extreme stress and trauma. At the end of the week, Genevieve returned to her old self. She looked forward to coming home and being reunited with family, friends and pet dog Bronte. She was discharged from hospital on the Friday afternoon. As soon as she got out of the hospital she rang me at home on my wife’s mobile from our car. She was happy and cheerful. She was glad to be in the car with Mum and looked forward to getting home. I put on dinner and had a surprise present to give to Genevieve when she got home. Word got around our community that Genevieve is coming home and a bunch of flowers arrived on the front doorstep from some school friends. I felt so happy.

About twenty minutes later our phone rang again. It was Linda. She was crying and hysterical. Linda kept saying ‘Something is wrong with Genevieve, something is wrong with Genevieve’; she started to smash the windows of our car yelling ‘You are the evil mother, you are the evil mother, there’s blood all over the windscreen’. Genevieve tried to jump out of the car while it was moving in peak hour traffic. Had she got out she would have been killed by falling onto oncoming traffic. Linda immediately engaged the automatic locks and grabbed Genevieve to stop her from smashing the car. Genevieve scratched and bit trying to escape. Genevieve thought Linda was the evil mother in the video who was a murderer in disguise trying to kill her daughter. Linda somehow managed to manoeuvre the car in peak hour traffic whilst restraining Genevieve into a petrol station where an ambulance was called. The ambulance soon arrived and sedated Genevieve. She was immediately returned to the Royal Children’s Hospital.

Upon this news, I broke down. Monique, our youngest daughter waiting eagerly for big sister to return also broke down and cried uncontrollably. I had to get a neighbour to drive me into the hospital immediately. Another neighbour looked out after Monique. Upon leaving, Monique started yelling ‘Daddy please don’t leave me, Daddy please don’t leave me!’. To this very day, we cannot leave Monique on her own. For the following few days, Genevieve began drifting in and out of the Scream video. When she drifted into the video, she became extremely scared. She believed that the people around her were all murderers from the video and were trying to kill her. She tried to flee but had to be restrained by hospital staff. When restrained, she bit and scratched to try and get away. Her condition deteriorated to such an extent that she had to be admitted to the Children’s Psychiatric Ward at the Austin Hospital.

Over the following days she was counselled by some of our best child psychologists and her condition improved remarkably. At the end of the week she was discharged. For the following months at home, Genevieve experienced some pretty traumatic nightmares. Some were so bad that she almost drifted back into the psychosis, which was the condition she suffered at hospital.

Three years have now passed and I am pleased to say that Genevieve has made a full recovery. Amidst the publicity that followed Genevieve’s trauma, we soon discovered many other cases of young children being traumatised by violent horror movies. Though Genevieve’s case is the first medically recorded case of brief reactive psychosis caused by watching a violent horror video, we believe it is not an isolated case. Feedback from our experience highlights that there is a silent epidemic of young children being traumatised from exposure to violent horror movies. I congratulate Young Media Australia and the federal government for recognising the problem of the effects of inappropriate media upon young minds and formulating solutions to begin dealing with this problem. Thank you.

Barbara Biggins

Thank you Michael, and the whole family, for sharing your experience with us. We hope that the Helpline will live up to your expectations and that good will indeed come out of Genevieve’s experience.

The relevance of that story to our Helpline is that the Scream video was classified MA. That clearly says this video should only be shown to children fifteen years and over, and you can’t see it under the age of fifteen without adult supervision. Now obviously in the birthday party sleepover situation, that classification was ignored. One of the big things we’re hoping to promote with the Helpline is to much increase parents’ understanding of the classification system. It means something. It’s there to protect children. So we’ll be pushing the meaning and the usefulness of the classification system as hard as we can go through the Helpline.

I would like to welcome now Steve Biddulph . Steve is well known to many as a family psychologist and an author of many books that have helped many a parent faced with the challenges of child rearing. I first made contact with Steve a few years back when he wrote an article in the Melbourne Age about the impact of some recent cinema films on children. We exchanged views and found a common concern that many media experiences, such as exposure to violent films and advertising and marketing pressures, were detrimental to children’s development. Steve later became Young Media Australia’s patron and he has been a very real support to us. We are very proud to welcome him today. Thank you, Steve.

Steve Biddulph

Okay, I get invited to things to lighten them up a little, which looks like it’s the case again today too. I’m Steve and because of my books being around a little bit, I get invited to a lot of people’s homes. In fact, what they actually say is ‘Would you come and take my children?’, is the usual thing. (laughs) I was visiting a family about a year ago and they had a little five year old girl and we were doing what you do with families, which is watch TV. We just sat watching, I hadn’t even particularly noticed what was on at that moment, but actually it was a Jenny Craig dieting advertisement. And the little five year old turned to her Mum and said ‘That’s good Mummy, that lady’s husband will love her now she’s thin’.

And I was really struck by that because Genevieve’s experience is a very dramatic one and I think we could get sort of beguiled into thinking, well, that wouldn’t happen very often. But what happens, I think, is that the mental health of every child in Australia is affected gradually and continuously by the media. The message that you get loved if you’re thin, as we know, is a very dangerous message for young women. My daughter in her primary school class, there was a minor crisis because they discovered that all seventeen of the girls in her class had thrown their lunch into the bin for the last couple of weeks. The reason was that crop tops were in this year and so a whole class of nine year old girls were not eating their lunches so they could have nice flat tummies. Now I think that’s a little young to be worried about your body image. I don’t know what you think. These are things that used to be considered feminist issues, weren’t they? But of course now we live in a time of equality where the media trashes everyone equally.

Who’s a parent here, just by the way? So you know this, don’t you? That you make choices and decisions all the time; every hour you’re making various calls on what to do and where to go and how to deal with things. And one of the features of that is you make those choices in isolation and usually under pressure. And so inevitably from that, you make bad choices. Now, I was in a movie house one day and the film I went to see was JFK. You remember that film? And excellent, fantastic movie, but in the sort of light from the screen I made out that sitting beside me was a very young-looking child. When finally the movie ended, I asked him how old he was and he said he was nine years old and he was by himself. Remember, that movie was full of autopsies and replayings of the shooting of John F. Kennedy’s head blowing open, and I said ‘Why did you choose this movie?’, and he said ‘Oh, in school holidays my Mum drops me here in the morning and I choose three movies during the day to watch and I’ve seen all the other ones’. We could condemn that but, again, it’s under pressure without good information.

I saw Lantana a couple of weeks ago and there were a mother with what looked like a ten and a seven year old child watching the movie just in front of me. What I do is look at the faces of those kiddies as they come out and it’s a look that you’ve seen. I’ve seen that look on the faces of young policemen that I’ve treated for pulling kiddies’ bodies out of bus crashes and things like that—that look of being overwhelmed by the world that they think they live in. I think probably no one after Michael’s story doesn’t believe in the reality of post-traumatic stress disorder, but you may know that now the psychiatric hospitals across Australia are filling up with seventy-eight year old men who fought in the second World War and whose defences are breaking down so they are once again overwhelmed by what they experienced in that war fifty years ago, and unable to function in their marriages and their families in the outside world because of that. So you realise the fragility as well as the strength of the human mind.

One of, I think, the most general effects of commercial television on children is that it’s specifically designed to make you unhappy. If you think about what television is meant to do, television that follows advertising, it’s to make you unhappy with your looks, with your possessions, with your relationships. It’s actually a continuous process of making you miserable so that you’ll want to go out and buy more stuff. You know what I’m talking about. So it’s a direct attack on the self-esteem of children and teenagers and adults. And it’s like a third parent that you invite into your home to help you raise your children. In particular, I have huge concerns about the around thirty per cent of children who have a television in their bedroom and who fall asleep with a hand on the remote control, having watched whatever happens to be on at 9.00 or 10.00 at night. That’s an awful kind of imagery and way to live your life.

Finally to sum up, the thing that’s happening now that’s concerning especially parents of kids even a little bit older is that the horror of the world is getting closer, and so we now have concentration camps in Australia. There’s a concentration camp thirty kilometres west of here with everything that that entails, sadistic guards, people scared out of their minds, children being driven mad with grief and fear of what their future holds. So we have another issue of how do we explain that to our children that our own government is doing that? How do we make sense of it?

These are hard questions, but the Helpline and this existence of trained counsellors providing that twenty-four hours is a brilliant back up because parents love their kids. They’re good at what they do, but they can’t do it on their own. So the fact that now from anywhere in Australia you can dial up a number and talk to somebody about a movie that’s coming up your child wants to see—why is it rated the way it is? What’s behind that? What’s in that film? So that experience—of being at the movies with your kids all revved up to have a nice treat and halfway into the movie you think this was a bad idea—is an awful situation to be in. That’ll be avoidable because you’ll be able to talk to someone about what’s going on with the ratings, which movies are good and which aren’t? And even if your child is affected by a movie, how you can get good recovery from that and what you can do. Thank you very much and congratulations to Barbara and to everyone involved in setting up this excellent initiative. Thank you.

Barbara Biggins

Thank you very much Steve. The Young Media Australia Helpline is a national initiative, and the funding is national and the access will be national. But the concept of the Helpline and the effort to find funding for it came from South Australia. The content of the Helpline database has been prepared by the Executive of Young Media Australia based in Adelaide. And additionally, the call centre function will be handled by skilled counsellors at the Child and Youth Health Parent Helpline in Adelaide that’s been running for many years. We are outsourcing the handling of the calls to Child and Youth Health staff who’ve got considerable experience in parenting advice so that the special content that we can give them about information about media impact can be put into a solid parenting context.

Another strong South Australian connection with today’s launch is Senator Jeannie Ferris, Senator for South Australia. Senator Ferris was in a past life a journalist in both print and electronic media. She is currently Deputy Government Whip in the Senate and she’s chaired a couple of Senate Committees on different aspects of the media and so is very well qualified and informed in this area. Please welcome Senator Ferris.

Senator Jeannie Ferris

Thank you very much Barbara. It’s really a great pleasure to be here. And also to Michael and the Ooms family—it’s not easy to talk about these things publicly. But can I assure you, we were all thinking of you. And also to Steve Biddulph, I found your information both frightening and fascinating. The thought of nine year old children being dropped off to spend a day choosing their own films as a babysitter.

But it really does give me a great deal of pleasure to come here today to be able to open this Helpline. I first met Barbara and Toni a couple of years ago now when they were by far our most credible witnesses at an inquiry looking at how we deal with children’s access to the Internet, which was then perhaps emerging as a new communication force in homes. The difficulty that we had was to ensure that parents who were unfamiliar with the technology—and let’s face it, that’s most of us over thirty-five—have not grown up with computers and are therefore not as familiar with it as tiny fingers are, were able to get access without the parents really knowing either how to deal with it when they found the access was being given, and how to ensure that the access could be managed in some way.

I do remember meeting with a constituent about that time who had got a massive telephone bill. She was a woman on her own with three children and working late in the afternoons. And the children were coming home from school, the elder child I think was about twelve and was getting access on the Internet that the mother had no idea about until the telephone bill came in, which was nine hundred dollars or something, from memory. So I have no doubt that this phone line will be utilised by parents when they have concerns about what their children are going to watch on television or on video. And I really commend Young Media Australia’s efforts in this. Barbara and Toni have worked absolutely tirelessly on this issue for years and I’ve been very happy to support them because, as Barbara says, you can ask your mother for parenting advice about the normal day-to-day things, but child psychology is a fascinating but emerging and dynamic development that we’re not always able to pass on as contemporarily as you were able to do, Steve.

I’m very proud to represent the government in this initiative. This is an initiative of former Senator Jocelyn Newman who had a great interest in the work of Young Media and had a number of grandchildren who were six, eight, ten, who frequently visited her in Parliament House and she was a very interested granny in the development of those children. So I have no doubt that the Stronger Families Initiative which Jocelyn Newman developed as a Minister has helped a number of groups in the community such as this one.

We as a federal government have given two hundred thousand dollars to start this Helpline. I said to Barbara before we started this morning, now that we’ve got it up and running, we’ll have to start worrying about the ongoing funding to make sure that this line continues because I have no doubt that there will be a great demand for it. I think one of the most important things about the Helpline is the fact that a real voice will be on the end of the telephone. You won’t need to press one or press two or press three, as you often do these days to access information. There will be a person twenty-four hours a day to be able to help, and I can only imagine how reassuring that would have been for you at the time, Mrs Ooms, if you’d had that opportunity to make that very first call. Knowing where to start with something like this would be an absolutely daunting experience for anybody.

I think we all know, Mums and Dads, how hard it is to be a good parent and we all work really hard at it. It is an ongoing demanding and exhausting job, and I must say my two sons are now in their thirties and I think it was hard for us, but we didn’t have the challenges that we’ve got now with the younger children and the demands that are put on them for body style, for food, for clothing, for education, for toys. It’s ongoing. And as you stand in the supermarket queue every weekend, you hear children pressuring their parents for consumer items that are strategically placed for people who are in those queues, and often they are things that the parent would normally not want to buy. But I heard the other day that if the child asks nine times, it seems as if they’re likely to get an answer that they want. You can only feel for those mothers.

I was very interested and quite disturbed to read the paper that Barbara sent to me by Dr Joanne Cantor, the author of Mommy, I’m Scared—How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do To Protect Them. That research shows that our children’s anxiety levels have been steadily increasing since the 1950s and that children’s level of anxiety and their frequently disturbed sleep are significantly related to the amount of television that they watch. I remember having a great dilemma myself when one of my sons was probably the age of one of your daughters, Mrs Ooms, and the Vietnam War images were on television. I can remember him being profoundly disturbed by the strafing and the use of napalm and the very visual footages. In those days it was only in black and white. But I was talking to Barbara about it before we started and I popped out and telephoned him to ask him what he remembered because he’s now in his mid-thirties, and he remembers very vividly those images and could recall them to me.

And they were on the news every night at 6.00 o’clock and I think that’s a time when all of us are under pressure. We’ve come home from work, we’re trying to prepare meals, we’re bringing in the washing—we’re doing all those family chores and, let’s face it, we often let the children go and watch television because it stops them fighting and arguing and it acts as a babysitter. And that is when classifications can’t determine what’s on and I can only imagine what children are thinking now when they see these graphic images of the war in the Middle East and the collapse of the World Trade Centre. I don’t think we ever need to see that image again to forget it, but how often do you see it? And I can’t help wondering when weapons of war are described as things—like daisy bombs—the image of a pretty little flower conjures up something which clearly a formidable weapon of war is not. And those images on our nightly news which we can’t classify for because they’re there. It means that parents who do find an hour later when their children won’t go to sleep, there is a friendly voice on the end of the phone that they can talk to about those difficulties.

And the fact that, as Dr Cantor says, ‘Seeing is believing with children under eight years old’. They are not able to distinguish reality from fiction, and so the chance for parents to be able to discuss that with an informed friendly voice, I think, will be very important and very helpful, and I’m absolutely delighted that the federal government has been able to do that. And as well as that sort of advice, there’ll be the opportunity to discuss what children would be best not to see—the videos, the movies, the MA classified material which we think if we sit down and watch with a child might be satisfactory, but we’ll now be able to discover may not be.

So I’m really pleased to officially launch the Young Media Helpline, the 1800 number and the website address of Young Media, which is www.youngmedia.org.au, and I really hope that these services will be of assistance to parents, and I especially look forward to following up on it to see what material is coming out of the parents’ conversations with the Child Health experts. I think that will provide us with some very important follow-up which certainly, as a Senator for South Australia and someone very interested in this issue, I’ll be delighted to know about. Thank you very much for coming and thank you for the invitation, Barbara.

Barbara Biggins

Thank you very much for your kind words, Senator Ferris. And also for your many past efforts in supporting us in our search for funding.

Well, the phones are now open. 1800 700 357. Ring them up. Ask that question that’s you’ve just been bursting to ask. Basically we would like your help today to get the word out there to Australia’s parents, that this service is now available and that it can be very helpful to them. Can we enlist your help in spreading the word about the number? If you’ve got access to newsletters, journals, any media outlets, can you let people know that the service is there and waiting for them?

In closing today, I’d like to thank a number of people. I’d like to thank particularly our guest speakers, Michael, Steve and Senator Ferris. I’d also like to thank Pamela Wright. Pamela is the Young Media Australia’s new Development Officer. She’s worked extremely hard for the past four months on this project to get it to the stage of the launch. She has a very creative approach and she’s very resourceful and has worked enormously hard. I’d like also to thank those who have helped with the organisation of today’s event, Toni Jupe, Jenny Barker, and the Federation of P & C of New South Wales who put up with us all day yesterday. Back in the office in Adelaide, I’d like to thank Marion Sullivan, Brigitte Sloot, Andrew McPhail, and Sarah and Julie for all their very, very hard work.

That’s the end of today’s proceedings. Thank you very much for coming. Please join us for morning tea in the foyer.