You have been banished from the citadel of childhood
by Marie Murray
published by The Irish Times 05/06/2004

The marketing of sex and violence to younger and younger children is stealing their innocence and their childhood, writes Marie Murray.
'I'm not so innocent'.
No, little child, you are not.
Your innocence has been betrayed, your childhood stolen, your body marketed, your gender defiled and your identity determined. You have been banished from the citadel of childhood. You are a lucrative commodity, a target for unscrupulous exploitation.
There is money to be made from you, and you will want and want new things and when you get them you will still be sad and want some more. There are images to sell and we will sell them to you. There are images to sell and we will sell them of you.
There is nobody to defend you, cherished child of Ireland, nobody to protect you from the oppressive system of liberalism that allows "anything" because it is afraid of returning to past oppressive systems.
You are a child who can be overtly abused because we are afraid of the secret abuses of the past. You cannot be protected because that might look like censorship. We adults are terrified of censorship because there was a time when everything was censored. We have not learnt the difference between censorship and child protection. I fear we never will.
I know you are embarrassed. You stand at bus-stops going to school, and there are pictures of women with no clothes. Sometimes when you buy your comics in the local shop the adult "comics" just above them show you women hurting men and men who tie up women who wear leather in dogs leads and other things. These must be adults' games, you say.
And your favourite idol, Britney Spears, does that, too. You've seen her throw that man up on the bed and jump on him and spit green stuff into his mouth. She called it Toxic, and her pretty face looked evil.
I know that you are sometimes frightened; frightened by what you see. You have television in your bedroom with scenes that make you feel afraid of being a child. But you are more afraid of growing up and "running wild" and drinking 'till you vomit in the gutter, and you are nearly 10 so that is soon.
Then you tell me you will do the "sex" thing with the boys and girls and you won't feel afraid or stupid because the drink and drugs will make you feel OK. Or so you say.
It seems there is no safe place in this whole wide world when all you see and hear and overhear tells you that life is sad and ugly. The "News" is bad, you tell me, but the adults like to hear it. They watch it all the time and read the stories in the papers that show the pictures that you do not like to see.
You tell me that when you wake at night you turn the TV on. And what you see you cannot say in words because it's a feeling. You can't tell adults. It's just too embarrassing. So they think that you don't see it. Or they think it is above your head. They think you are not hurt by what you do not understand. They do not understand how hurt you are.
Sometimes you do homework on the Net, or you decide to find some stuff about your toys, your Barbie, or your Pokemon. But your eyes are hurt by what you find, your heart races and your hands feel damp and you feel sick and dizzy as if you want to cry. Your tummy hurts a lot. You keep on looking.
After a while you get brave and strong and you can look at anything, anything at all, and you want it to be bad, to be more viciously disgusting: to give you, just once more, that lovely shivery thrill you had before.
You love Play Station 2 - once it was so lonely without friends. You even thought it could be good to make up your own games. Imagine, make them up and have them stretch through days and days of play. But now you tell me you have even better friends like Hit Man and Max Pain, and Hit Man is a great assassin for he can blow your brains out and you can hear his victims scream and wail and watch their insides spurting out.
It's just a game. And it's OK to bash and bruise and bludgeon 'till the person falls. It happens all the time. Just read the papers.
Max Pain is even better. He has nothing left to lose and nothing he won't do, and your parents haven't got a clue you're playing it and when you cannot play you feel all sick inside and angry and you really need to play and play your "killing" game. For now you know that it's OK to kill and torture.
You've seen it all before. It doesn't matter, and who cares if hooded people die each day. It's just a game, another adult game, a game that adults like to play and talk about and shout each other down on television and feign concern and say things have to change and tell each other lies and get found out and blame some other people.
In Ireland we find someone else to blame. The Past. The Brits. The church. The institutions. The market forces that force us all to follow where they go.
But sometimes when we look into your eyes, see your soul corroded, childhood stolen and eroded and hear your sad bravado we remember all the research that we have on what you need and do not implement.
"We're not so innocent."
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin, Ireland.

© The Irish Times