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Barnardos goes for shock again in latest campaign

Finance | Tania Mason | 17 Nov 2008

Barnardo’s is living up to its reputation for controversial advertising with the launch of a new campaign in which gun-toting adults go out hunting children as if they were wild animals.

In the online ad, a group of men sit around talking about the problem of “vermin” and “parasites” and suggest that sterilisation could be one solution. Then they agree to go out and “do something” about the problem, and are seen loading rifles before venturing out into the night.

It is only when they find and fire upon their prey that the viewer sees they were talking about a group of young people out on the streets.

The TV advert, which launches on 24 November, is called Break the Cycle and is a different creative execution. The campaign aims to show how society demonises young people. As part of the wider Children in trouble campaign, the charity has also released the findings of a survey of adults, which found that 45 per cent of the 2,021 people questioned think that children are feral in the way they behave.

Just under half (49 per cent) believed that children are increasingly a danger to each other and adults, and 43 per cent agreed that “something has to be done to protect us from children”.

Real-life comments

The advert ends with a voiceover explaining that all the comments made by the hunters were taken from actual responses to stories on newspaper websites.

Barnardo’s chief executive Martin Narey (pictured) said the campaign was Barnardo’s attempt to tackle public misconceptions about how troublesome young people are.

“The British public overestimates, by a factor of four, the amount of crime committed by young people,” he said. According to the latest British crime survey, kids commit just 12 per cent of all crime, yet people think they are responsible for up to half.

A report called Breaking the Cycle completes the campaign materials. It claims that young people who become criminals generally come from the most deprived families, have the worst education and are more likely to suffer from ill health.

Complaints about previous ads

Barnardo’s has a history of using shocking imagery in its campaigns – previous ads have featured pictured of a cockroach crawling out of a baby’s mouth and a baby holding a heroin-filled syringe.

The campaign featuring the cockroach was the most complained-about campaign of 2003 and was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority, but not until it had already run its course.

Update: By Wednesday 19 November, the Advertising Standards Authority had received 43 complaints about the online ad, but was powerless to act because the ads had only aired on the internet, not on TV.

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