A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

To be shown with people whose impairments might make viewers recoil in disgust would be
to spoil the image. Anne Finger writes of media and celebrity fondness for awareness-raising
campaigns for conditions like leukaemia:
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...those pallid young children wasting slowly into death. No ugly protruding
tumours. No convulsions, no spasms, no missing limbs (Finger, 1994:115).
Mary discusses the use of children in charity advertising by comparing campaign posters
produced in the 1960s and in 2005 by The Spastics Society and the same organisation re-
branded, Scope. The 1960s poster bore the prominent alarming statement It could have been
your child and depicted:
a lovely little girl, of course … pretty, pretty … hair in bunches and she‟s probably
about … don‟t know … four, five, right … and she‟s on callipers, right … and
behind her, in the background are some other children with mobility aids …
(l.2:523ff.)
Describing the 2005 poster, Mary says:
it‟s got nine little kids and they‟re all … you know, three, five, right … all dressed
up in different things like there‟s a paramedic, erm … a doctor … erm… what else is
there… painter … you know, all these kinds of things… they look like the Village
People, yes… without the er … the er … Native American, „cos obviously there
isn‟t a job being a Native American … right, erm … but, but they‟re an ethnic mix
and … it‟s, it‟s apparent that some of them have impairments, right… erm …
obviously and, you know … it says... the strapline for this is Want to Work? We
Do… (l.2:529ff.)
Both posters rely on images of cute disabled children to make money. Mary describes her
annoyance as being about the fact that this kind of imagery involves:
...the infantilising of disabled people … right … why have children… well,
obviously you… you‟re using children because it‟s emotive and also … they‟re cuter
than disabled adults... (l.2:615ff.)
It seems obvious to suggest a cynical link between the use of images of children and charity
income generation, but I suggest something deeper is also going on. Julie Shaw Cole and
Mary Johnson argue that: