E212 Tma03

Outline the ideas about childhood and child work suggested by the campaign image, and discuss them in relation to the module materials.

The image and text produced are positioned together to highlight the problems of child work faced by majority world children to the Western society as part of a fundraising campaign. The boy with ripped jeans is central to the image, located in a factory setting, indicates poverty through the hazardous and exploitative working conditions. The accompanying emotive language 'frightening' is designed to gain the audience's attention, where the role of semiotics is designed to provoke a certain reaction; a vast contrast to the contemporary notion of Western childhood as being protected from the adult world (Hammersley, 2013).

Moreover, the fact that no child is looking into the camera may implicitly represent their fear, intended to evoke strong emotions of pity. In addition, the 'we' in the large textual slogan places responsibility on the audience to make child work obsolete, where the central focus on an individual child as opposed to a group of people enables viewers to connect more intimately. This is likely to have a bigger impact on the audience to free children from this viscous cycle of child work as it is an emotive issue, but this does not come without its complexities (The Open University, 2015).

For example, the audience will actively construct their own meaning in response to the campaign, but there are vast differences between the perceptions of childhood in the majority and minority society, varying across cultures. This includes the children who may view their working position differently to outsiders, which will be discussed next. This research includes girls and boys, and can generally be applied in relation to the campaign image and text which is evidently gender specific (The Open University, 2015).

Subsequently, children's perspectives on work in the factory in India by White et al cited in...