Wednesday 1 February 2012

Anti-[Insert Crime Here] Advertisements

You're enjoying your night watching television, hanging out on Facebook, or perhaps taking a stroll, riding the bus, or driving home. BAM! ANTI-AD. These things are everywhere, Anti-rape, anti-animal abuse, anti-domestic abuse, anti-murder. However, do they really even do anything? No. Not really.

Let me hea....

Oh, I'm supposed to rant.. right. Okay.

Hey, I've got an idea. We should send pictures around of naked women, or videos of women being raped. At the end of the video, or on the bottom of the picture we should put ANTI-RAPE. IT'S NOT OKAY TO RAPE PEOPLE. Sounds effective to me.

Wait a second, hasn't anyone caught on to the fact that seeing this would only increase rates of the crime happening? Think about it. Crimes that occur happen for two reasons; Impulse (crime of passion) or deliberation. If you have a rapist on the loose, would showing them pictures or video of rape be a good way of handling the situation? No. So why then do we should pictures of dead animals for animal abuse, or a bruised woman for domestic violence? People who commit these crimes either don't care that they are committing them, or committed them impulsively. This means these advertisements do literally nothing to prevent them. In fact if you show someone these pictures it may just come to the fore-front of their thoughts and may increase their urge to re-commit the crime.

What about awareness then? Right. I forgot we live in a society where people don't know that rape is considered socially and morally ineffably wrong. Or animal cruelty, or murder, or domestic violence. Do you really think that people don't realize these things are happening and that it's wrong?

The truth is that these advertisements bring "awareness" and awareness in this case is synonymous for money. These organizations want to remind you that these crimes are being committed and you should help. Unfortunately, you can't. If you knew someone committing the crime, you would have already told the authorities, or if you don't have a moral compass, this advertisement certainly won't convince you to. This means that because you don't know how to help the victims of these crimes "we do." By we I really mean the company that funded the advertisement, WITH THE MONEY PEOPLE SENT THEM AFTER SEEING THE LAST ONE.

The bottom line is that you should know at the end of the day what these advertisements really are for. If you're going to send money into these organizations, make sure they're actually doing something other than making useless posters or guerrilla marketing campaigns.

Good luck out there -- there's a lot of expectations.