Respected judges, elders and dear friends! I am Mihir Ray, a student of Class IX from PQR School, Cuttack. It gives me immense pleasure to stand before you and express my views on the most highlighted recent topic “Are Children victims of advertisements?” It is just a golden opportunity for me and a matter of great pride and glory to justify my view whether children are victims of advertisements or not. In my opinion children are victims of most of the advertisements and strict laws are necessary to ban these.

Advertising is a tool used by business companies to inform people about their products and to persuade them to buy those. Advertisements in newspapers, magazines, televisions, internet, e-mail, telephones, and hoardings have become everyone’s primary attraction, especially of children. Our tastes, our habits, our clothes, modes of travel, entertainment, our choices of schools, colleges, universities, and household products get decided by advertisements. Advertisements targeting children has long been a very successful way to secure a lifetime of purchasing. Children are fast learners and they can be influenced pretty easily. When an advertisement projects a certain wrong idea, it does not take much time to get embedded in the soft mind of the child. I think there must be a very strict code governing the advertisements especially where the target audience is children.

Many advertisements do not bring out real information about the products they describe. Children idolize certain characters, succumb to some simple appeals and are immature about the mechanism of a sales drive. It would be unfair to use Mickey Mouse or Barbie Doll to sell a sub-standard item. Many of the food advertisements that children are being exposed to are products that are of low nutritional value. Craze for fatty, fast foods among boys and girls is due to advertisements. Hence, children are victims of the advertisements and strict laws are necessary to ban these.

Many children are the target for most advertisers, because they know if they pursue at their parents, they will buy their products. Young children tend to accept advertisements as fair, accurate, balanced and truthful. But, most advertisements only show out half-truths. Some advertisements even intentionally propagate sexism, racism, and ageism. Sexual attraction is often times used in advertising a product, which can be very appealing for children. Every time a teenager opens up a magazine or switch on the television, he is confronted by beautiful women showing bodies or performing erotic scenes in advertisements. Moreover, sex and nudity have become a trend in most television advertisements. Many ads in television channels encourage smoking, drinking, foul language and stealing. These ads put very harmful impacts in the innocent mind of children. This affects children in many ways as they become disturbed and develop bad tendencies. Hence, in my opinion children are in true sense, the victims of most of the advertisements and strict laws are must be formed to ban these.

Lastly, before concluding my views, I would like to say that children are also exposed to the increasing amounts of violence in various advertisements, especially in television, which hampers their mind severely. The government must enact strict laws to ban these.