During our 2010 Weekend of Uplift this May, Mother's Day Radio partnered with the Ida B. Wells Institute to screen the film, "Very Young Girls" which took an in-depth look at child sex trafficking. In our discussion following the film, participants marveled at how easy it was for pimps to manipulate these 12, 13, and 14 year old girls by offering them the idea of something that they were missing at home--a man to "love" and take care of them, family, a sense of belonging, and a feeling of being wanted. The price these girls paid to their self-esteem, health, well-being, and self-identity was painful and entirely too high.
Yet, even our girls who are not physically being trafficked are paying a high price every time they turn on the radio, download a song, or watch a video that misrepresents them as dehumanized, objectified, hyper-sexualized caricatures. What do you think? Do music lyrics and media images impact the identity, self-esteem and socialization of developing girls? , you may have your hunches about this. Current research says, yes, they do.
Studies show that African-American female adolescents with greater exposure to Hip-Hop videos with high sexual content are twice as likely as other girls to have multiple sexual partners and 1.5 times more likely to have a sexually transmitted disease. Some theories suggest that this is a result of their identification with the women in the videos, women who look like them. It may also be due to their learning of social norms and behaviors from the videos based on the cultural's social acceptance of these images.
With the physical, emotional, and psychological well-being of girls being threatened, how do we stand in the intersection of degrading media images and the identity of our girls? I believe it is imperative to train our young girls and boys to be critical thinkers about the media they consume and to be empowered in their decision-making about the artists and music they financially support and emulate in their daily lives.
Through our
Media Justice Peer Mentor Program, Mother's Day Radio seeks to stand in the intersection as a resource for developing girls. Mother's Day Radio's service learning collaboration with California State University-Los Angeles (CSULA) and California State University-Northridge (CSUN) trains college students to become media justice mentors for Los Angeles partner high school students. CSU students develop the skills to lead teens in deconstructing sexism and racism in media while raising awareness about the impact that media has on youth socialization. The program empowers all participants with the knowledge-base, skill sets and tools to make conscious decisions about media consumption and creation.
This year we are happy to partner with CSULA Psychology students in the Fall and CSUN Pan-African Studies students in the Spring. They will develop and facilitate workshops on gender, identity, socialization,
misogyny, sexism and racism in popular art forms. The powerful dialogue between these young adults and teenagers helps to create a generation of aware, critically thinking, positively focused, responsible youth.
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