Pictures appeared on YouTube and in the Egyptian and international media of Egyptian children wearing T-shirts with the words “I'm a potential martyr” written on them during the Rabaa Al-Adaweya sit-in organised by supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of the removal of former president Mohamed Morsi after the 30 June Revolution. They were also shown on TV chanting slogans calling for the return of Morsi, and, during the week before the beginning of the school year, children in Kerdasa were shown carrying signs saying “we will not return to school until Morsi returns.” There are now increasing concerns that such forms of political advertising using children could represent a form of child abuse, these being added to more traditional worries about the presentation of children in the media or in commercial advertising where children are used to make a profit out of selling goods. One mother who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly under condition of anonymity said that the use of children in advertising could damage them. Her teenage daughter had asked to be allowed to work in advertising when she was younger, but her parents had refused because they were afraid that she would not have enough time for her studies. “Companies need to boost their sales, and for this reason they resort to using children in their ads. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the children are not made to mouth political slogans or are caused damage to their personalities or childhood experiences,” the mother said. However, there are also other concerns. According to another mother, Thuraya Abdel-Hamid, childhood itself may have changed due to the use of technology. Children have become more mature in the ways they think because of their exposure to the media and technology, she said. They watch a lot of TV and may end up acting like adults before their time. “I don't believe that advertisements damage children, though TV probably should bear some of the blame in producing hyper-active kids. I would accept that my children should be allowed to take part in advertisements, but there are other priorities in our lives, such as education,” Abdel-Hamid said. For her part, Mahravan Idris, 11, separates commercial ads from the political exploitation of children. She would accept to have a role in a commercial ad because it would be a good opportunity for her, she said. “Besides, I like to watch the ads. Some people make good ads, and others don't. I like the shampoo ad where the world the girl lives in is pink, and I particularly like her pink bedroom. But I don't like the political ads, and I don't think it is right to make children carry political slogans,” she said. Ali Suleiman, a psychologist, is also concerned by the phenomenon. There is no law in Egypt that prevents children being used in the media, and there is no authority to regulate the ways in which they could be used, he said. Moreover, some hospitals use children in their advertising as well, even though they are the only ones to benefit from the children's services. Political groups are also showing a growing interest in using children to put across their views. This is what happened during the Rabaa Al-Adaweya sit-in, for example, when both women and children were used in the front rows of the demonstrations to serve as human shields so that no one would attack them and to give a false idea of the composition of the demonstrations, he said. No moves have been made to regulate this situation. Another concern that Suleiman and others have is the use of street children for political and other purposes. These children lack protection, and they are open to abuse, he said. In the case of street children, it is not only their families that are to blame, since in many cases they may not have families, but it is also the government that is in the wrong in not taking responsibility for these children. “The Ministry of Labour is responsible for halting child labour; the Ministry of Education is responsible for children in schools; and the Ministry of Social Affairs should be responsible for taking care of orphans and other children,” Suleiman said. Hoda Zakaria, a sociologist, said that the media was trying, through its use of children, to capitalise on the general culture in which children have an important role to play. Parents might buy their child a policeman's outfit, because they dream that he will someday grow up to be a policeman, for example, and others might dress up their children in another way in order to admire the way they look. In such cases, the child is treated as a kind of peg on which the parents can hang their dreams, Zakaria said, and he or she becomes a kind of proxy for these dreams coming true. In other words, for some adults children are made to achieve what they could not achieve in their own youth. A poor person who has suffered from injustice might want his child to be strong or have authority, for example, and in such cases “parents are looking for a solution to their own problems. But on the legal level, a son is not his parent's property: it is never a case of ‘this is my son and I can do what I like with him,'” Zakaria said. “There are also other sociological concerns, and these have to do with the need for greater child protection. We see this in the advertisements showing children being used to attract audiences — for example a child driving a toc-toc or behaving like a grown man in an advertisement for adult products. There is no proper code of conduct for advertisers in Egypt that regulates what advertisers are and are not allowed to do,” she added. One reason behind these advertisements, Zakaria said, was people's desire to dream of fame or money without thinking about the ethical issues involved. “Part of the problem is that the TV talk shows do not host specialists like sociologists and psychologists to guide people, while media specialists take up most of the time on these programmes just because they cover these types of cases in the papers they work for,” she commented. Suleiman believes the solution could come from learning from others. In the Gulf states, for example, public bodies supervise all issues concerning children, and this could be something that could also be done in Egypt. “Legal protection comes first. A law that protects children should be issued and then implemented,” Suleiman said. “People who are responsible for consigning children to the streets or using them in political demonstrations should be appropriately punished,” he added. Orphanages should be more closely regulated to prevent them from taking advantage of the children in their care by using them in the media. There should also be a law that would prohibit children being used in advertisements without the permission of the institutions that are responsible for them. Parents should be made to send their children to school in all cases, and if they do not they should be appropriately sanctioned. According to Suleiman, the National Council for Women and Children should be given a larger role to play, and it should graduate from its present one of simply exhorting people to behave better when it comes to children. There should also be greater awareness of the social dimensions of the problem. “There should be awareness-raising classes for parents to teach them how to raise their children properly, as well as programmes to show mothers the possible outcomes of leaving their children in the streets. The laws should be respected: a respectable country does not simply look the other way in cases of the abuse of children.” Zakaria agreed and said that in Western countries, among them the US, there were public bodies designed to ensure that human rights, especially children's rights, were not violated. This is something that Zakaria would like to see more of in Egypt. In her view, television could also be used as a powerful instrument to change people's perceptions of children. “The British sociologist Steven Lukes makes the point in his book on power that the best way to influence an audience and make them start reconsidering their ways of thinking is by the use of TV. But at the end of the day, society must take action, and no one should be allowed to make money out of children without considering the outcomes and all the parties concerned,” she concluded.
