Breast cancer charity CoppaFeel! will feature on The Sun’s Page Three every Tuesday for the next six months, as part of a new £1.5m campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer.
The ‘Check ‘em Tuesday’ campaign will see The Sun’s controversial Page Three dedicated to raising awareness for breast cancer.
CoppaFeel!, which was founded in 2009 by Kris Hallenga who was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer at age 23, hopes to reach the 2.2 million people that read The Sun in print every day. It says that its target audience of 18 to 35-year-olds makes up 1.7 million of the newspaper’s readers.
The Sun’s Page Three receives a lot of criticism from campaigners who want to rid the paper of the images of semi-naked young women. A petition by campaing group No More Page Three has been signed by MPs including shadow minister for civil society Lisa Nandy.
When asked about the controversy surrounding The Sun’s Page Three, a Coppafeel! spokeswoman told civilsociety.co.uk: “Coppafeel! is a charity with only five members of staff and can never reach the amount of people that The Sun can. [The partnership involves] £1.5m worth of media content and so Kris’s view is that if she’s saved lives then the controversy around the campaign is only a good thing because it raises awareness and people pay more attention to the campaign.
“She realises that some people have strong views but she has thought carefully about entering into this partnership and decided it is a great thing to do.”
Coppafeel! had an income of £479,567 last year.
The campaign has taken over the front page of today’s Sun, as well as pages two and three and features in the newspaper’s pull-out ‘me’.
CoppaFeel! said: “This partnership gives us the opportunity to raise awareness of breast cancer among a huge new audience. As a small charity, this is a big deal and an extremely exciting (and incredibly busy) moment in time for us.”
Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, tweeted: “um bit worried model not doing breast exam right as seems 2 have made her lose her trousers? #awks @NoMorePage3”.
In an online statement campaign group No More Page Three said that it hopes the campaign succeeds in encouraging women to check their breasts that otherwise wouldn’t and congratulated the charity’s founder for securing the powerful platform.
However it said: “We can’t help but feel that it’s a real shame The Sun has decided to use these sexualised images of young women to highlight breast cancer. They will say that they want to use the power of Page Three as a force for good – we say that a society in which sexualised images of young women are seen as that powerful has to change.”
CoppaFeel! founder Hallenga said: “If someone had educated me about breast cancer and how to spot the signs, I might not be in the predicament I am in now where I have to go into hospital every month for treatment and take a daily cocktail of drugs.
“It is my mission to encourage all women of any age to be breast aware: Know what is normal for you; look and feel; know what changes to look for and report any changes to your doctor without delay.
“I am proud to be doing whatever I can to prevent other women going through what I have been through and I am so excited about this partnership and what we can achieve from it.”
Sun editor David Dinsmore was quoted in the paper saying: “Twelve thousand women die of breast cancer every year – mothers, sisters and daughters – which makes it a big issue for our readers, and The Sun is all about big issues. Through the iconic power of Page Three I hope all our readers will check ‘em.”
This is not the first controversial cancer awareness campaign to have emerged in recent weeks. Pancreatic Cancer Action‘s “I wish I had breast cancer” campaign was criticised both by Breast Cancer Awareness and Breakthrough Breast Cancer when it ran last month.
