A Spoonful of Sugar

BY Rowena Robertson

When I was a child I was terrified of a paedophile called Mr Baldy. I found out about him one evening when I was watching the news with my parents. The two terrible facts I learned about him that night – how he shaved off little boys’ hair and dressed them in girls’ clothing – came to dominate my imagination in a way that I can hardly fathom now.

My mother went into damage control when she realised how deeply affected I had been by my discovery of Mr Baldy. She told me that the crimes occurred in Melbourne and we were in Mt Macedon, so therefore I was safe. She told me that after he had been caught, his victims had been sitting in the police station happily drawing pictures of the police cars that had come to take Baldy away. And I suppose these two brand new facts did pacify me, a little.

Now, as then, the world is rife with paedophiles. But unlike in the past, today the world is also teeming with other atrocities that were inconceivable when I was a child. Back then, planes didn’t plough into buildings live on TV and giant waves didn’t kill hundreds of thousands of people. How on earth would you shield a child from such monstrousness?

Would the method employed by Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful – pretending that horror is part of an elaborate game – work when it comes to current-day disasters? Perhaps not, but his idea of creating an illusory world is a sound one. What we need to do is tap into something with which kids today are familiar and comfortable, and use that to get around the awful truth. We could even use something with which Roberto Benigni himself is more than au fait – movies.

Think: in spite of your best efforts, it is quite likely that your child is constantly being exposed to the huge amounts of violence and horror coming out of Hollywood. So why not use your child’s familiarity with explosions, urban chaos and violent death to protect them?

So, the planes flying into the buildings will simply become a scene from the latest Vin Diesel flick (tell them that those people jumping out the windows are going to land on a big trampoline put together by Vin just in the nick of time). The twin towers collapsing are the result of the latest in CGI, as is the footage of the tsunami engulfing south-east Asia. When your child asks why that footage is so grainy and jumpy, tell them that it’s just like The Blair Witch Project, where the amateur feel is actually a filmic device. To give your argument more weight, you could even explain the Dogme 95 theory to them.

And when they ask who that man on telly is who always drones on about axes of evil and threats to the American way of life, tell them this: he’s just a brainless actor reading from someone else’s script.