Youth campaign

Press, 19 September 1985, Page 11

Youth campaign

To counteract the social pressures on the young to begin smoking, the Department of Health in conjunction with the Cancer Society recently ran a television campaign aimed at 10 to 19 year olds.

The campaign emphasised that smokers are a minority — a fact which surprises many children — and that non-smoking is normal behaviour.

Cigarette advertising, the Health Department says, tends to show a strong link between smoking and a healthy, fun-filled lifestyle. The inference is usually that the “beautiful people” smoke and have a really good time out of life as a result.

Adolescents, who perhaps yearn to conform more than any other group in the community, tend to fall for that approach, the Department says.

The television campaign therefore aimed to show young people that an exciting, sophisticated, masculine, healthy lifestyle need not involve cigarettes at all, and that being an attractive, popular person does not have to include smoking.

The lifestyle approach of the campaign complements the Education Department’s health education resource programmes, aimed at intermediate pupils and high school students in Forms 3 to 5.

The H.E.R.P. team points out that the “younger generation” is unlikely to respond to suggestions or information that carry a negative message. The nonsmoking message therefore needs to be a positive one, stressing the benefits of not smoking: attractiveness, fitness and good health. In a preliminary report on teachers, pupils and parents’ reactions to the H.E.R.P. kits, Terry McCarthy says the general feeling is that school-based programmes can only be effective if they are supported by the family and community. The school’s role is seen mainly as information giving: providing the “facts” to facilitate individual decision making. An “anti” stance to smoking by the school is both expected and accepted, he says, though pupils in the face of peer pressure will still try it out. Terry McCarthy believes the way in which the kits are used is crucial. Students who professed to being bored and unimpressed had been set tasks such as copying “facts” into their school books. Others who undertook activities and experiments were more positive — “It makes you think.” Whether behaviour changed as a consequence is, of course, another matter, he admits.