Radio Review/Bernice Harrison: It's been difficult to get into that cosy warm Christmas-is-a-time-for-children mode because, while pre-teens cropped up on several radio programmes this week, it was largely because of abuse, exploitation, disadvantage and obesity.
The week started with Barabbas - the Teenage Years (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday), the first in a four-part drama series for children. For parents, the idea that children or teens would sit diligently listening to a radio play is heartwarming, and maybe a little optimistic, especially last weekend when US movie Thirteen hit the screens showing an apocalyptic vision of teenagers as bottom-tattooing, drug-taking sexual experimenters. Barabbas is a successful, inventive theatre company but its attempt at children's radio drama was disappointing in dramatic terms and disturbingly off the mark in content. The main character was a boy who was going through some sort of mental health episode in which he made decisions based on the throw of a dice. If he threw a four, he'd wear shoes to school - that sort of thing.
The young actor playing the boy had a kid's acting voice, his school tormentors were flat-voiced Dubs, the headmaster a stage culchie - cliché casting all the way. His mum brought him to a psychiatrist, and then he was institutionalised. Radio drama doesn't, of course, have to be educational but when it's directed at children, there's a case to be made that it should at least be responsible. It's not perhaps the best message that if a child feels in some way odd or strange then it's a fast track to residential psychiatric care.
Kids are highly susceptible to media messages, which is why Green TD Eamon Ryan and parents' campaigner Fionnuala Kilfeather were advocating greater control of advertising to children on Lunchtime with Damien Kiberd (NewsTalk, Tuesday). John Holohan, from the advertising representative body, IAPI, was on for a bit of balance, but as he had all those obese, doughy-looking Irish children down at his end of the seesaw, he didn't have a chance. Ryan pointed out that of 200 commercials he monitored on daytime TV, more than half were for junk food. Holohan's trump card was that "one in five children in Sweden is obese - and they ban advertising to children". When that didn't wash he said that advertising is number seven on the list of things that influences children. Kiberd was in like a flash, pointing out how nonsensical it is for advertisers to claim, when it suits them, that advertising doesn't really influence. Listeners will recall that the drinks industry used to put up that same daft defence until the uproar over teen alcohol abuse forced it to reconsider its advertising strategies.
Exploiting children by turning them into pest-power consumers is a world away from the criminal exploitation that Gemma Holland, of the COPINE Project in UCC, sees every single day. Several radio programmes picked up on this week's excellent Prime Time programme on child pornography and The Gerry Ryan Show (2FM, Wednesday) had Holland on to talk about her work. By monitoring Internet activity, she and her colleagues come across up to 60,000 images of child abuse in cyberspace every single month. Except, of course, the images don't stay in cyberspace for long before being downloaded in nice suburban houses by apparently ordinary blokes. Part of her project is to try to identify the victims and set international police forces to work finding the children and prosecuting the perpetrators.
Ryan asked all the right questions in a quietly sensitive way (yes, really, Gerry Ryan), including one about the way looking at such images had affected the forensic investigator.
"I'm constantly aware of children," Holland said, "if I'm on a beach and I see someone with a camera, I'll be watching to see where it's pointed."
Harking back to advertising's ability to exploit, she added that if she's watching TV she'll be particularly aware of ads where children are naked or half-dressed. She knows how a paedophile might interpret those apparently innocent images.
The parents of the four pupils in the Jonah Project school in Waterford have different problems. Their children are autistic and, unable to find appropriate services, the parents set up their own school based on a South African teaching method called SNAP. As both presenter and producer of The Jonah Project (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), Jacqui Corcoran created an easy, intimate documentary. She simply talked to the parents and tutors but their stories and their personal strength shone through with every sentence, making for a powerful piece of work. The parents had struggled first to get a diagnosis and then to get appropriate help. They fundraise, teach and run the school, and all spoke with a frankness about how challenging it is to have a child that is different.
"I looked at him as an oxygen thief," said one mother of her six-year-old, adding that after six months of the SNAP programme, "I had my child back and I can live with him for a change."
It was a welcome life-affirming piece after listening to so much insensitivity and negativity.