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July 31, 2009
So we have a radio station 2DayFM owned by Austereo that has its FM's top-rating Sydney breakfast show hosted by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O'Neil Henderson interviewing people with a lie detector test on air to help increase its ratings. This has been going for about six years and this regular stunt on the show of this celebrity shock jock radio is designed to shock and humiliate people to provide pleasure for Sydney's bogans.
In this case the girl's mother submitted her 14 year old teenage daughter to the test due to her concerns about her daughter's experiences with drugs and sex and wagging school. An initial question: why would a mother would do this to her child? Isn't this a form of public humiliation?
Before the actual test, the girl admitted on air to Sandilands, “I'm scared ... it's not fair”. Her mother asked her daughter: “Have you ever had sex?” The teen replied: “I've already told you the story about this ... and don't look at me and smile because it's not funny.” After a pause, she raised her voice with frustration and said: “Oh okay, I got raped when I was 12 years old.”
After a long pause, Sandilands then asked “Right ... is that the only experience you've had?" before the mother admitted she knew of the rape “a couple of months ago". Her daughter yelled, “Yet you still asked me the question!”
Sandilands implies that rape is a sexual experience as distinct from a violent experience of power over a woman.
So why was the teen strapped to a lie detector and asked about her sexual experiences in public in the first place? On Punch Sandilands says in his defence:
I’ve certainly pissed off a lot of journos over the years but I’m sad that they’re using the rape of a 12-year-old girl to have a go at me...As for what I said, it wasn’t intended to hurt. If people have found it appalling or offensive I’m sorry for them that feel that way, but I would ask people to put themselves into the situation where someone says to you during a live radio show that they have been raped.
Nothing about the more substantive issue why was the teen strapped to a lie detector and asked about her sexual experiences in public in the first place.
Isn't this a case of an underage child being asked personal questions about her sexuality for entertainment?
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There's way more public outrage over this than there was over the Chaser Make a Wish thing, yet that ork Sandilands and O woman are carrying on business as usual. I can't imagine the Chaser guys even contemplating such a thing.
I don't know what's worse, that the whole setup was allowed in the first place, or that a mother is prepared to put her daughter through it. But I do think the ACMA has proven itself so ineffective it should be scrapped and something entirely different put in place. Some kind of public humiliation process maybe. Some kind of broadcast reconciliation thing, where Alan Jones has to talk with Lebanese Muslims and Kyle Sandilands has to face a panel of mothers.