Responsibility goes off the air

Melinda Tankard Reist
Women's Forum Australia

July 2009

DON'T humiliate kids for radio ratings.

THE lie detector incident on 2Day FM involving a 14-year-old girl who revealed she had been raped at age 12 was not a case of a radio stunt going horribly wrong as some have put it. It was horribly wrong before it even started.

Austereo's Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O had planned to interrogate a child about sex and drugs on live radio. That was ethically questionable even before the shattering disclosure.

A vulnerable girl, at risk and deserving of protection, became a media plaything. Listening to the audio of the girl's live-to-air ordeal is like witnessing a forced confession.

Jackie O: Has she told you she's had sex before or do you think she's avirgin?

Michelle (mother): ... I think she might have had sex before.

Jackie O: All right, we have her hooked up to the lie detector.

Kyle Sandilands: Ohhhh!

Jackie O: She's not happy!

Sandilands: How are you Rachel?

Rachel: I'm scared. It's not fair.

(She is asked about sex.)

Rachel: I've already told you about this and don't look at me and smile because it's not funny!. Oh, OK! I got raped when I was 12 years old!

Sandilands: Right. And is that the only experience you've had?

Michelle: I only found out about that a couple of months ago. Yes, I knew about that.

Rachel: And yet you still asked me the question.

While it is Rachel who is the one on trial, her answers resonate with truth and an insight lacking in her interrogators. Astonishingly Sandilands tries to gouge more from her as though the rape of a child is just one item in a buffet of possible sexual experiences. She is silent. Suffering the forced violation of her body, her abuser walking free for the past two years, she is given an on-air mauling; her human rights violated a second time. It didn't matter that she was scared. Nothing should stand in the way of a young girl's public shaming and the audience's titillation.

Jackie O said the team never intended to stage a "sick stunt". "There is no way we would want to go down that path or put that girl in that situation," she said. But Jackie, you did put her in that situation.

Research shows that sexually active children of this age are often dealing with serious problems such as family breakdown and parental dysfunction, substance abuse, psychological problems and coerced sex. The radio show hosts barging in with their intimidating lie detector were never going to be able to sensitively handle any of this. Sandilands seems unable to accept responsibility for what happened. It's all about nasty people out to get him and spoil his fun show.

This episode is not an unfortunate slip-up. The program has a sordid history of sexual stunts. According to MediaWatch, in past lie detector episodes "contestants have had their honesty tested on subjects like STDs, masturbation, anal sex, threesomes and eating faeces during sex." One lie detector segment featured a man asked to identify his girlfriend's vagina from three images. On May 6, Sandilands and others (in a show syndicated around the country) held a competition in the station office to see who could masturbate the fastest and who had the largest sperm count. With armloads of porn, they were sent to cordoned-off toilets. One returned and wiped his "sticky" hand through Jackie's hair.

Perhaps someone should take another look at self-regulation. There's not much of it to be found in the Kyle and Jackie show where children like Rachel are preyed on, treated as mere fodder for entertainment and ratings.

Melinda Tankard Reist is the editor of Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls to be released in September by Spinifex Press.