An email alert from the DSA reports on a new THINK! campaign aimed at making children, well… think before crossing the road.
The campaign cost £700,000 (it uses those animations with ugly characters, like the Lloyds Bank ads) and will be run on TV and in cinemas. It’s aimed at 6-11 year olds and “spells out the dangers of not taking care on the roads”. It emphasises the importance of crossing safely and making sure you can be seen when you’re out in the dark.
Is it just me who thinks that the real problem is being totally ignored, and actually used as a tool to make matters even worse?
Although there are reasons why 6-11 year olds would be out after dark (i.e. on their way home from school in winter), there is no mention of the fact that most of them will still be out after 9pm – indeed, out until the local off licence or chip shop closes and there’s nowhere else to stand smoking, spitting, and swearing whilst blocking the door with their BMX bikes or attempts to skateboard.
And what self-respecting hoodie is going to wear anything other than a filthy black or grey top with baggy black trousers. How many BMX bikes even have a location for a light, let alone have one fitted?
And how can you expect any 6-11 year old to know any better when their parents – little more than children themselves in many cases – behave in exactly the same way?
The problem is the parents – it is they who should be receiving the education, not the kids.
I’d also point out to Mike Penning that, in spite of his best rhetoric, it isn’t anything new. Over the years we’ve had dozens of them – all of them worked – and once upon a time 100,000 children or more took a cycling proficiency test. These days, they just inherit a frontal lobotomy from their parents.