Talk Shows Exploit Teen Sexuality

The shows cost next to nothing to produce, and there are still plenty of parents willing to usher their children on-stage for a nationally televised dose of sexual exploitation and humiliation. So it is unlikely anyone will pull the plug on the degrading shoutfests that are known euphemistically as talk shows.

A few local stations have objected and some sponsors have balked, but barring a wholesale reawakening of common decency among advertisers or top network executives, the airwaves will continue to be fouled with shows that use real children to illustrate such rancid topics as the following:

“My Daughter is a Tramp,” “Teen Sex - Better in the House Than in the Back of the Car,” and “Mom, I’m a Teen Prostitute” (all hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael); “Deadly Erotic Teen Games” and “Poor Black Teen Buries Her Baby Alive” (Jerry Springer); “Virgins Face Off against Sexually Active Teens” (Jenny Jones); and “Teens Who Refuse to Practice Safe Sex,” “Teen Girls Who Have One-Night Affairs,” and “My Teen Son Killed the Man Who Molested Him” (Montel Williams).

Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, said the shows, with their relentless sexual voyeurism (aimed at inflaming the studio audience and titillating those at home), belong on the same sordid continuum as child pornography. “They often dress the young girls very provocatively,” he said, “with miniskirts and lots of makeup, trying to make them look highly sexual.”

Like pornographers and pimps, the talk-show hosts and their producers found a gold mine in the sexuality of troubled children. There is no mystery involved. Viewers get turned on, the ratings go up, and the cash rolls in. When I tried to reach Raphael for a comment, I was told she was vacationing in Italy.

Poussaint denounced the shows, in which children as young as 12 are encouraged to go before the cameras and, as he put it, “bare their souls” to satisfy the “salacious expectations of the audience.” The youngsters have no idea what to expect, but at the urging of adults who ought to know better, they prattle on about the most intimate, and often traumatic, aspects of their lives.

Then, without warning, they find themselves demonized, as the live audience, and sometimes the host as well, turns on them. Booed, cursed and otherwise reviled, the youngsters frequently are left weeping and bewildered.

Raphael recently hosted a show that featured a 12-year-old who claimed to have slept with 25 guys, and a 15-year-old who said she had been molested by her mother’s boyfriend. The host wore a cloak of sanctimony throughout. “With all due respect,” Raphael sniffed, “I don’t think they need understanding. They need to be told it isn’t right. They don’t need to be understood.”

Poussaint pointed out that no one knows in advance what the consequences will be for the children, either on the show or long-term. A child, unprepared and emotionally vulnerable, could come “completely unraveled,” he said.

The youngsters must also face the reaction of friends and others in their home communities who may have seen the program, and there remains the question of how to deal with the problem that got them on television in the first place.

Dr. Albert J. Solnit, a child psychiatrist who is Connecticut’s commissioner of mental health, agreed that encouraging sexual revelations by children in the overheated and seductive atmosphere of such shows was “completely irresponsible.” He, too, warned that the youngsters could easily feel that things were out of control and that they were “uncared for.”

Referring to one show, Solnit said the question that came to his mind was, “Who in heaven’s name gave permission for these children to do this?”

Television is exactly the wrong remedy for the kinds of difficulties experienced by the youngsters who are lured to these shows. Both Poussaint and Solnit stressed the importance of putting such youngsters in touch with responsible adults, and assuring them that they can discuss their problems quietly and confidentially, and in a way that is not at all threatening.

“The proper way is first of all to have empathy,” said Poussaint. “These are young people who deserve support and help and direction.”