Radio Call In Fail
This blog post title may be the understatement of the week, considering what took place on a radio station in what turned out to be the worst idea ever. A concerned mother wanted to keep her child under control and be labeled a good parent by all the listeners of this ill-advised program. She decided it would be a good idea to hook up her young daughter to a lie detector machine and let total strangers (bantering radioheads) question her about her sexual history and drug use and broadcast this humiliating exchange to thousands of perfect strangers.
Yes, I know it’s the standard fare of Maury and Jerry Springer and Rikki Lake and Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil or whatever popular knob talking head to project bad parenting to the masses but this is my blog and I can hate all those idiots for abusing teenagers in public if I want to. So there!
Being a teenaged girl is bad enough as it is, what with the menstrual cycles, snapped bras, dirty jokes, public school and the perverted boys, without subjecting a girl to this kind of abuse. And this story is bad enough as it is, but hold onto your hats it’s about to get a lot worse.
You see, the teenaged girl had been through a rape a couple of months previous to the show and mom hadn’t felt this detail was important enough to pass on to the questioners. That’s right, the teenaged girl had to tell the world about her sexual assault on the air. At least the questioners had the decency to back off after that revelation but it’s still horrible.
I had a rather unpleasant thought about all this business. What if the teenaged girl had been through an assault and had decided to keep it a secret. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about it with her mom because she didn’t think she would understand or maybe the experience was just too painful. And bantering radioheads asked her about her sexual history and she said that she hadn’t had sex and failed the lie detector test. And then the bantering radioheads and the mom ganged up on the girl in public on the radio about her sex life. It’s a truly appalling thought. That’s the last thing that any girl recovering from a sexual assault would need.
You shouldn’t have to talk about your sex life to people without your consent. But who cares about the rights of teenaged girls! It’s apparently okay to be a mean-spirited bully instead of a parent. Selling ad space in our over-commercialized culture is more important than anything else. Garbage like this is the reason I don’t watch television or listen to the radio anymore. Talk radio is the worst.
Oh but I am not done yet. They tried desperately to make the standard offer of counseling to fix the poor, poor victim. It’s what is offered to sex assault survivors everywhere. “You need counseling.” That is none of your business. And it doesn’t change the fact that you have traumatized someone who already went through a terrible experience. What all survivors everywhere need is for people to quit being insensitive jerks. Counseling is far from being all you need to recover from rape. How about if we send all rape-enablers for some counseling and see how they like it?
