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kierkehaard · 7 years

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Analysis of ‘mother!’

About a week ago, I went with a friend to watch Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller ‘mother!’. Truth be told, I’m still recovering. Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence themselves did mention that the show wasn’t for everyone, and I understand why they would say so; the show is prodding, uncomfortable, and excruciatingly persistent in discussing what it wants to discuss. But I’m not just saying this because of its controversial portrayal of religion and Christianity - I’m pretty sure the internet has already been flooded by discussions on the matter by now. Instead, I wanna talk about how it deals with one of the concepts I personally hold quite dear to my heart: pacifism. Spoilers ahead, of course, so I’d recommend you watch the movie before reading this post.

Angel In The House

Let’s first talk about the portrayal of Jennifer Lawrence’s character, since she’s probably the most pacifistic and passive character in the movie (at least, in Act I). She represents an old Victorian literary trope that Darren Aronofsky revives in his movie, called the ‘Angel in the House’. This is basically the archetype of the domestic goddess, the pure and virtuous wife who brings life and beauty into the household, the compliant angel who glides through the house performing her domestic duties. Essentially, the Angel in the House is the Victorian ideal for everything a woman ought to be. We can see this being represented to the letter in Lawrence’s character (henceforth referred to as Jenny for the sake of brevity). When Jenny is by herself, she is often seen performing household chores like painting a room or washing the clothes. Even more telling is her lack of identity except in relation to her husband. He can be seen to have a job, and leaves the house multiple times. Jenny never does, and can be assumed to be a homemaker. She and the house are actually actively paralleled, with the house constantly mirroring her state of mind, especially during her breakdowns when the house itself shakes. The hole in the floor disappears once the domestic conflict that Adam and Eve bring about is resolved, and the house itself actually physically breaks when she finally loses it in Act II. In fact, the only times she actively requests to leave the house are when He puts her in uncomfortable, destructive situations: once when Cain had just left the house and was probably going to return, and when the house was invaded by cultists worshipping her husband, ‘Him’. Yet, every time, her requests are denied, and she readily complies. She never actually leaves the house. The notion of her being the Angel in the House itself already symbolises compliance, meekness and passivity. The fact that she actively keeps herself within that role from the instruction of her husband seals her identity as the representation of these values. She isn’t going to be a Nora or a Lady Windemere; instead, she remains, for the greater part of the movie, blindly compliant, blindly passive.

Passivity to Pacifism

This is the part where we make the jump from her representing passiveness to her representing the values of pacifism. You can probably already see the links; pacifism in its garden variety is essentially a moral code based on passivity, but the jump requires moral conflict. Aronofsky provides Jenny with plenty of these, and often in explicitly violent terms. We see Cain beat his brother to death, we see Jenny forced to witness the death and gruesome consumption of her child. Even her rebirth involves the tearing out of her heart. In other words, Jenny is subject to violence throughout the movie. And for all the damage the various characters wrought on her house, for all the harm that came to her, she simply turns the other cheek. In fact, when Cain confronts her and aggressively justifies his innocence to her, she simply cries and nods. I’m not saying that this isn’t a reasonable action to take in that circumstance; hell, if some guy cupped my face in his blood-soaked hands and demanded if I understood the rationale behind his murder, I’d probably do the same thing. But the fact that this was explicitly slid into the scene rather than making Cain simply just leave there and then does more than to add realism. It characterises Jenny as one who is most comfortable sitting in the backlines, accepting and enduring all the wrong done to her and within her house; it characterises Jenny as both passive and pacifist.

Of course, she isn’t ALWAYS passive. She finally snaps and turns violent at the sight of her child being eaten, massacring the cultists who engaged in the perversion of the Holy Communion. In fact, she refuses to allow Him to carry her baby out to the crowds in the first place, the first act of disobedience she actually makes in the movie. That’s where the importance of the baby comes in. The common idea of what the baby represents is that he’s supposed to be Jesus. And of course, that’s definitely the case. But evidently, using that definition alone doesn’t really do justice to what the baby means to Jenny. All her major character developments are done in relation to the baby; she flushes her painkillers down the toilet bowl after she becomes pregnant, a resolution to her inner conflict that arose from the intruders in her house; she takes a stand against Him when he demands her baby, and she finally descends to pure rage at her baby’s death. Ultimately, the baby is Jenny’s motivation. It is goodness, purity and innocence. And that’s exactly where Aronofsky’s critique of pacifism lies.

What All This Means

What Aronofsky presents to us in mother! is the self-defeating and hypocritical nature of passive pacifism. It’s not just that you’ll eventually snap and get sick and tired of being kicked around; it is about justice. Think about it; if nobody is there to enforce right and wrong, who’s there to uphold the notion of rightness in the first place? In a morally bankrupt world where fans eat babies and the poet simply watches as his own son gets torn to shreds, how can one simply stand back and watch as the individual’s and the world’s purity becomes corrupted, and simply offer up your other cheek? I’ve read some complaints that the characters in the movie are unrealistic, but I frankly think those criticisms just show a lack of awareness of what mother! was trying to do; subverting reality is the whole point of the movie. In this world, everybody is compliant and everybody is passive: even God. There is no individuality among the cultists, and completely no objection to the consumption of the baby’s body. They even just stand there meekly like sheep as Jenny culls through the herd in her rage. ‘He’ himself says that ‘I don’t want them to leave’, demonstrating his wilful ignorance of the cultists’ evilness in his desire to be worshipped. Even the non-passive characters, like Cain and Eve, bring nothing but harm to the homestead when they act of their own volition. In a world like this, the supposedly moral act of letting evil acts pass unjudged ironically breeds more and more evil. Ultimately, pacifism ends up morally corrupting itself, just as Jenny, in her inability to assert her will, eventually burns down her own house in her fury.

The idea of moral passiveness often has links to religion. God is the arbiter of the just and unjust, and men have no right to enact their own flawed moral compasses as the ethical standard. John 6:37 - Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Instead, what we should do, as Matthew 5:39 puts it, is simply ‘not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also’. But if God himself is passive, if God himself lets injustices continue in the world without punishment, then who is left to make sure that goodness prevails? mother! is often interpreted as a religious allegory, and that’s of course the canon and mainstream reading of the movie. But through its treatment of the religious, I think Aronofsky might be getting at a more moral, more tragic message against sitting in the backlines and simply taking everything in stride. Because that doesn’t just hurt you. It hurts everyone around you too.

This is not to say that pacifism or religion isn’t justified. The last thing I want this article to be seen as this edgy rant on the ‘inconsistencies of Christianity’ or ‘how Christianity makes you weak’ or whatever. I myself am a Christian and largely identify as a pacifist as well. But maybe that’s why this movie left such an impression on me. Of course, this isn’t exactly a matter of critiquing pacifism as a whole. You can still be against violence without being guilty of the hypocrisy that Aronofsky describes here. But what I think he’s really trying to get at is moral and personal passivity, the idea that standing back and letting things just run their course is somehow the right thing to do. And the justification for this is always that ‘my moral judgements may be wrong’, or that ‘it’s not my place to rock the boat’, or even ‘who am I to judge?’. Far too often, we simply dismiss our lack of courage to do something about injustice by hiding it under the guise of ‘simply wanting peace’ and ‘never resorting to violence’. But that really isn’t what being a good person, or even being a pacifist, is really about. And I think we all need to start acknowledging that - even though it isn’t always wrong - the fatalistic commitment to inaction itself is a conscious decision that we cannot shirk responsibility from.

#mother #jennifer lawrence #darren aronofsky #ethics #ethical #movie #movie review #pacifism #passiveness #god #victorian #critique #mother!#food for thought

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thoughts-of-a-coffee-addict-blog · 5 years

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10 Books I Read & Loved in 2018

#1 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extends suffering. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified. Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

#2 The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In love we find out who we want to be. In war we find out who we are. France, 1939 In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When France is overrun, Vianne is forced to take an enemy into her house, and suddenly her every move is watched; her life and her child’s life is at constant risk. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates around her, she must make one terrible choice after another. Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets the compelling and mysterious Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can...completely. When he betrays her, Isabelle races headlong into danger and joins the Resistance, never looking back or giving a thought to the real--and deadly--consequences.

#3 Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.

# 4 The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

Alaska, 1974. Unpredictable. Unforgiving. Untamed. For a family in crisis, the ultimate test of survival. Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier. Thirteen-year-old Leni, a girl coming of age in a tumultuous time, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, dares to hope that a new land will lead to a better future for her family. She is desperate for a place to belong. Her mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for the man she loves, even if it means following him into the unknown At first, Alaska seems to be the answer to their prayers. In a wild, remote corner of the state, they find a fiercely independent community of strong men and even stronger women. The long, sunlit days and the generosity of the locals make up for the Allbrights’ lack of preparation and dwindling resources. But as winter approaches and darkness descends on Alaska, Ernt’s fragile mental state deteriorates and the family begins to fracture. Soon the perils outside pale in comparison to threats from within. In their small cabin, covered in snow, blanketed in eighteen hours of night, Leni and her mother learn the terrible truth: they are on their own. In the wild, there is no one to save them but themselves. In this unforgettable portrait of human frailty and resilience, Kristin Hannah reveals the indomitable character of the modern American pioneer and the spirit of a vanishing Alaska―a place of incomparable beauty and danger. The Great Alone is a daring, beautiful, stay-up-all-night story about love and loss, the fight for survival, and the wildness that lives in both man and nature.

#5 Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.

#6 The Circle by Dave Eggers

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company's modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

#7 The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo's stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo's desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

#8 Eleanor Elephant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live. Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she's avoided all her life. Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than. . . fine?

#9 The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

A captivating, beautiful, and stunningly accomplished debut novel that opens in 1918 Australia - the story of a lighthouse keeper and his wife who make one devastating choice that forever changes two worlds. Australia, 1926. After four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns home to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day's journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom's judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them. M. L. Stedman's mesmerizing, beautifully written debut novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel's decision to keep this "gift from God." And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another's tragic loss.

#10 The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

Magic, adventure, mystery, and romance combine in this epic debut in which a young princess must reclaim her dead mother’s throne, learn to be a ruler—and defeat the Red Queen, a powerful and malevolent sorceress determined to destroy her.On her nineteenth birthday, Princess Kelsea Raleigh Glynn, raised in exile, sets out on a perilous journey back to the castle of her birth to ascend her rightful throne. Plain and serious, a girl who loves books and learning, Kelsea bears little resemblance to her mother, the vain and frivolous Queen Elyssa. But though she may be inexperienced and sheltered, Kelsea is not defenseless: Around her neck hangs the Tearling sapphire, a jewel of immense magical power; and accompanying her is the Queen’s Guard, a cadre of brave knights led by the enigmatic and dedicated Lazarus. Kelsea will need them all to survive a cabal of enemies who will use every weapon—from crimson-caped assassins to the darkest blood magic—to prevent her from wearing the crown.Despite her royal blood, Kelsea feels like nothing so much as an insecure girl, a child called upon to lead a people and a kingdom about which she knows almost nothing. But what she discovers in the capital will change everything, confronting her with horrors she never imagined. An act of singular daring will throw Kelsea’s kingdom into tumult, unleashing the vengeance of the tyrannical ruler of neighboring Mortmesne: the Red Queen, a sorceress possessed of the darkest magic. Now Kelsea will begin to discover whom among the servants, aristocracy, and her own guard she can trust.But the quest to save her kingdom and meet her destiny has only just begun—a wondrous journey of self-discovery and a trial by fire that will make her a legend . . . if she can survive.

#booksilove #bookworm #books and libraries #readmore #reading

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cstesttaken · 7 years

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The social media problems gripping our girls

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When 10-year-old Caroline* walked into Dr Michael Carr-Gregg's Melbourne office last year, her body thrummed with anxiety.

She and her mother had come to see Dr Carr-Gregg, a child and adolescent psychologist, because the girl had been coerced by a 10-year-old boy at her school into texting him a photograph of her breasts.

"He coerced her in a series of six or seven messages, and finally she did," said Dr Carr-Gregg. "And then he sent it off to 37 of his mates."

The result was catastrophic.

"It was absolutely devastating," said Dr Carr-Gregg.

"She became quite depressed, very withdrawn, she had tummy aches, headaches ... nightmares. She didn't want to go to school. Virtually every development was compromised by what happened to her."

Caroline had to switch schools once her humiliation "became very public". And that was just the start.

Was Dr Carr-Gregg shocked to see such a young girl pressured to take a nude selfie?

After all, high school-age girls have in recent years been the focus of an avalanche of studies and articles about how certain kinds of social media posts, selfies, or followers, can lead to issues like depression, anorexia, bullying, and even murder.

But Dr Carr-Gregg was not surprised by his patient's age, saying that a growing number of primary school-age children were experiencing such problems.

He counsels a girl aged between 10 and 12, who is suffering as a result of social media — she had been bullied, or had a "compromising photo" uploaded — every eight weeks.

"But it's probably a hell of a lot more common than that."

The new challenges of raising pre-teens

So it is, said Susan McLean, a former Victorian police officer and cyber safety expert who gives educational presentations to thousands of children every year.

"I have seen hideous cyber bullying and harassment at that [primary school] age, I've seen exclusion, I've seen kids set up accounts in other kids' names and use that as a tool to bully and harass other people," said Ms McLean.

"I have seen children groomed by predators [on social media sites]" — including some as young as eight and nine.

"I had one parent tell me, late last year, her 12-year-old daughter had been groomed on Yellow to share naked photos with someone who was much older."

Yellow, dubbed "Tinder for kids", is an app that enables Snapchat users to locate people nearby and swipe right or left, in order to become "friends".

All of this puts a new spin on what it means to raise pre-teen girls in 2017.

Whereas just a few years ago, it was 17-year-old girls speaking out about the pressure to mimic Kim Kardashian in selfies, in a "sexual rat race" with teenage boys, now it is not uncommon to hear stories of 11 and 12-year-olds buckling under the same stress.

As Sydney mother Elizabeth* said of her 12-year-old daughter: "Her friends are posting sexually suggestive pics [on Instagram] and now she wants to, too."

More kids using age-restricted social media sites

At the core of the problem, said Dr Carr-Gregg, is the dramatic increase in the number of primary schoolers who own mobile phones.

Whereas four years ago the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) reported that 35 per cent of them owned a phone, now that figure has hit 50 per cent, said Ms McLean.

And these children are storming social media, frequently on their phones, in even greater numbers.

According to the ACMA, only 45 per cent of 8-11 year-olds were using social networking sites four years ago.

But Ms McLean said at least 60 per cent of the 10 and 11-year-old children she saw at schools were on at least one social media site, with the majority using age-restricted platforms.

(The minimum age to open an account on many social media networks, including Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, is 13.)

While YouTube, Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin and Facebook were the top sites accessed by eight to 11-year-olds in 2013, now that honour goes to Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Musical.ly, a social video app that enables users to share home-made music clips.

And the sites in the latter group, said Ms McLean, leave primary schoolers more "prone to danger" due to "limited or no security" (many reveal a child's location) and the fact that they offer live streaming of videos.

Live.ly, the live stream function of Musical.ly, which is extraordinarily popular among primary school-age girls, "is full of predators and those streaming porn and self-harm", said Ms McLean.

Indeed, in December, a father in Wales reported that his daughter was groomed by a stranger on the app to send him nude photos.

And, six months ago, Ms McLean contacted the principal of a Brisbane school after she was informed by a Live.ly viewer that one of the school's 12-year-old female students was streaming videos that featured her cutting herself with a knife.

'Predators aren't interested in you when you're 45'

So why are parents allowing such young children, who until a few years ago were safely preoccupied by Frozen and loom bands, to use these sites?

Because, say experts, many parents do not see the dangers inherent in the sites, as they are forming their opinion of them based on their own experience.

"The predators aren't interested in you when you're 45," Ms McLean said.

"[So parents] think, 'Instagram's really benign, people are only posting food photos, so I can put my eight-year-old on there'."

The average middle-aged mother, in other words, is not going to be contacted by the likes of Fabian Roy Meharry, a well-known Victorian BMX rider and registered sex offender, who in late February faced court over blackmailing children as young as 11 to send him nude photos and videos. (He also sexually abused three of his victims.)

As one Sydney mother I spoke to said of her 11-year-old's Instagram account: "It's just a nice record of her childhood projects."

She feels, as many parents of under-age children using social media accounts I spoke to do, that because her child's followers were part of a social group of family and friends that was known to her daughter, she was not in danger of being preyed upon.

At the same time, many primary schools are failing to teach their students about the dangers of social media, a role that many experts, including Dr Carr-Gregg, believe should be mandatory.

(Australian schools are currently not required to deliver cyber safety education.)

"Sometimes there's the perception [by primary school teachers] that kids aren't on [social media]," said Kellie Britnell, senior education advisor at the Office of the Children's eSafety Commissioner, a federal government agency that provides cyber safety education, both online, and at the request of schools and parents.

"But we've been going in to schools for over eight years. You'd ask the question, 'Put your hands up if you use whatever [social media site]'," and children's hands would shoot up, she said.

"You would see the teacher's faces change. And go, 'We didn't have any idea'."

Aussie kids have the added difficulty of 'dobbing' stigma

In an ideal world, according to experts like Dr Carr-Gregg and Ms McLean, no children under the age of 13 would be on social media, or have a smart phone.

(Should parents want their pre-teen children to have phones for safety reasons, they say, they should instead give them "dumb phones".)

In that respect, there has been some progress.

Last August, Wenona's junior school, a private school on Sydney's north shore that teaches children from kindergarten to Year 6, banned Musical.ly on all devices brought to school.

The same month, more than 100 Year 5 and 6 students from across Victoria debated the topic, "All social media should be banned for children under 12", during a primary school convention at Parliament House in Melbourne.

It is no doubt a development that Dr Carr-Gregg will welcome.

Because while social media problems among primary schoolers has become a global phenomenon, Australian children, he said, have an added difficulty because of the stigma around "dobbing".

"That is unique to our country, and I do think that it exacerbates the problem of many young people I've worked with," Dr Carr-Gregg said.

Caroline, the 10-year-old girl he counselled after she sent a photo of her breasts to a boy in her year, suffered as a result of "dobbing" on him.

"Because of the power of the internet and social media, her reputation as a 'dobber' has actually gone with her [to her new school], and that has soiled her relationships with other people."

Such an outcome is not entirely the child's fault, said Dr Carr-Gregg, but rather a foreseeable consequence of allowing pre-teens, who are frequently uneducated about the dangers and responsibilities inherent to the online world, to communicate over social media.

"The moment you give [that] access to primary school girls, they're going to make mistakes," he said.

"They don't have the maturity to understand the consequences of what they're doing, and they kind of get carried away."

*Names have been changed to protect subjects' privacy.

Source

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-18/social-media-problems-gripping-girls/8356008