Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. How Big Business Callously Targets Children, Free Press, US: Simon and Schuster; UK: The Bodley Head, Random House, 201

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth

German

HannahArendt.net (E-Journal)

Ausgabe 1/2, Band 6 – November 2011
Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. How Big Business 
Callously Targets Children, Free Press, US: Simon and 
Schuster; UK: The Bodley Head, Random House, 2011 
I wrote two short pieces –750 words were allowed for each – for newspapers. One was a 
reflection on Hannah Arendt’s concept “the banality of evil” for a series that The Guardian 
of London is doing on “Big Ideas.”1 The installment of the series on “the banality of evil” 
was meant to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, 
about which Arendt had written her controversial ”Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on 
The Banality of Evil” (1963). The second piece was a book review for Toronto’s main 
newspaper, The Globe & Mail,2 of a book entitled ”Childhood Under Siege: How Big 
Business Callously Targets Children,” which appeared last week from Penguin/Canada. 3 
The author is Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia in 
Vancouver, who is well-known in Canada and in the U.S. for a best-selling earlier book, 
The Corporation (2004), on the basis of which he and a big production team made a 
terrific award-winning documentary, also called The Corporation.  This co-incidence of 
writing tasks made me think from two different directions about the topic Arendt once 
called “personal responsibility under dictatorship,” and in this blog I would like to share 
those thoughts with you –and the two texts as well.
Here is what I wrote about Bakan’s book:
If a group of legislators or policy-makers concerned to protect children and childhood 
from being targeted by corporations were looking for a briefing book, a catalogue of 
abuses, Joel Bakan’s ”Childhood Under Siege” would certainly be the right choice. It  
would inform them about the key American fronts of an undeclared corporate anti-
child war. But it would not help them analyze the war’s cause, track its history, or 
strategize their fight. 
Devoting a chapter to each, Joel Bakan takes up eight areas where corporations and their  
advertising departments are pushing developmentally inappropriate and unhealthy goods 
on kids and lobbying for anti-child policies. He explores, first, the world of video games 
and online “entertainments”, offering appalling examples of calculated manipulations of 
children’s love of excitement and their needs for company. Then on to corporations of 
various sorts purveying a “curriculum” to children. Precociously, they learn about sex 
from explicit sexual scenes and pornography that are available without check. Sexy 
clothes and gadgets can be bought by anyone; sexy chat and sexting are free. Violence and  
mayhem are ubiquitous. “Ninety percent of [U.S.] children between the ages of four and 
1 Guardian.co.uk, Aug.19, 2011
2 The Globe & Mail, Aug. 26, 2011 
3 Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Callously Targets Children, Canada (Penguin), US 
(Free Press, Simon and Schuster) and UK (The Bodley Head, Random House) 2011
1 
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl | Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. | http://www.hannaharendt.net 
six are on-screen for at least two hours a day…Tweens and teens spend, on average, eight  
hours a day … consuming media.”
Big Pharma has found in children the new frontier for selling psychotropics. Doctors 
and psychiatrists are manipulated into prescribing to children, whose brains are still  
developing, all kinds of meds, including anti-psychotics. Big Pharma’s marketing 
techniques are similar to those of food-producing corporations that market junk food, 
addicting children to regimes of sugar and caffeine, contributing to zooming rates of  
childhood obesity and diabetes and neurological disorders. 
These corporations are just as oblivious to the harm they are doing to childrens’ health 
as the environmental polluters responsible for making asthma the leading cause of child 
hospitalizations and school absences, as one in ten U.S. children suffer from it. Childhood 
cancers are on the rise, and the main culprits are environmental toxins. Corporations 
make sure that toxicity standards are made from adult data, while children are vulnerable 
to toxins at much lower levels. 
Child labor is slowly being reinstated, particularly in agriculture. Corporations are 
taking over the field of public education, which was supposed to have become universal 
with the institution of anti-child labor laws in the early 20th century. Charter schools are 
subsidized with tax payers’ money for their profit-making enterprises. 
In a corporation, which is a “person” in U.S. legal terms, the bottom line rules 
absolutely. Making the maximum for shareholders is a corporation’s legal raison d’être, 
explains Bakan, a professor of law in Vancouver.  So by its very nature, a corporation will 
not serve the people or “the commons” that belongs to everyone. This was the theme of 
Bakan’s 20…best-selling book ”The Corporation” and of a very fine documentary that was 
made from it. ”Children Under Seige” is an off-shoot of a long section in that book on “the 
nag factor”—that is, on how corporations set children at odds with their parents, who 
become powerless as their children are turned into consumers. 
Because it focuses on children, the current book is more limited than ”The Corporation” 
was by the way Bakan thinks and by the ‘child saver’ role he wants to play. He is given to 
utterly simplistic historical and causal statements: The targeting of children can be dated 
precisely to 1980, he announces, when neoliberalism triumphed and governments 
stopped regulating corporations. With that, the entire history of child abuse and neglect 
disappears from view. What is left is a Manichean face-off between Bad Corporations and 
Good Parents, who have only good intentions toward their children. Swallowed up in the 
bad “person” of the corporation, CEOs and managers are not persons, and are incapable  
of personal responsibility. But as parents those same people will be full of love and caring 
— and just as helpless in the face of their corporation’s power as any other Good Parent.  
All parents, he implies, are like the Bakans, who are described in embarrassingly  
schmaltzy terms in the Acknowledgements. They would never do any harm! 
In the Good Parents/Bad Corporations fantasy Bakan operates with, the Good are 
rendered powerless by the Bad, and the Bad is unstoppable because it is not made up of  
any real people who have real choices and real responsibility toward children and toward  
the future children represent. And there are no other adults: no citizens, no legislators, no 
children’s rights advocates. No political process. In Bakan’s world, no group of legislators 
 2 
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl | Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. | http://www.hannaharendt.net 
or policy makers would ever gather to read Childhood Under Siege and use it to try to 
protect children from the anti-child practices it investigates so well. 
In The Corporation, Bakan’s activist message was: a corporation is a legal entity 
constituted by a government for a limited period of time; that means a government can 
dissolve a corporation, particularly if it is behaving destructively, harming the people who 
are not its shareholders and devastating “the commons.” As the very least, governments 
can regulate corporations, as they once, to a certain extent, did. So Bakan was calling  
upon citizens to get their elected representatives to protect them from corporations. He 
could, therefore, leave unasked the question: but what about the people inside the 
corporation, the leaders and the shareholders, have they no insider responsibility? Are  
they just functionaries? What sense does it make to say “the corporation did this or that 
harmful thing,” as though a corporation really were a person making a decision, doing 
harm.
The personal responsibility question left unasked in ”The Corporation” is even more 
muted in ”Childhood Under Siege: How Corporations Callously Target Children”. The 
primary audience for this book seems to be parents, in their role as parents, not in their  
role as citizens who might act politically against corporations that are turning children 
into consumers or in their role as insiders in corporations. Without meaning to, I am sure,  
Bakan is sending parents, whose goodness and good-will he assumes, the message that  
they have been rendered powerless as parents by the corporations. The vicious and 
sexually debased video games your child is viewing on his electronic device are available  
to him no matter what you might try to do to block his access. The food regime you 
institute at home is no protection against the junk food available everywhere – or the junk 
added to what you think is good, nutritious food. Environmental toxins are in and around 
you; you are trapped. Corporate advertising has gotten to your kids and turned them 
against you, making them into kids who nag you until you give in and buy whatever it is 
they have been convinced to crave. Family unity has been undermined. This is not a call to  
action.
The great weakness of Bakan’s book, which is very valuable as documentation, is that 
he is confused about personal responsibility – he does not know how to think about it or 
how to write about it. He is right that corporations, as legal entities, encourage people to 
give up, as it were, their personhood and subsume themselves in the “person” of the 
corporation, which –metaphorically, but also in actual legal terms—is supposed to make 
decisions that maximize shareholder profits. So corporate leaders are encouraged not to  
consider the impact of their decisions on their customers, or on the environment from 
which they draw their materials and into which they put their waste products, or on their 
workers. They are rewarded for considering only the bottom line and for displaying 
loyalty to the corporate purposes; and, in doing so, they are law-of-the-corporation 
abiding. But this does not mean that they are not personally responsible; it just means 
they have chosen not to be personally responsible.
An authoritarian regime headed in the direction of being a totalitarian regime operates  
like a corporation: it rewards people who abide by its laws, even as those laws morph into 
laws which make harm and then murder legal and normal and which eventually sanction 
state-sponsored massacres, administrative massacres (which we now call crimes against  
 3 
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl | Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. | http://www.hannaharendt.net 
humanity). The bottom line is loyalty to the regime and its interests. But anyone who will 
not be such a faithful servant has other options: whistle-blowing, sabotage, becoming a 
resister and – if possible — helping organize a resistance. What people suffer to say no is 
often dreadful, but they have chosen that form of suffering rather than the suffering of 
going along in crimes against humanity.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
 4 


Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. How Big Business Callously Targets Children

Ausgabe 1/2, Band 6 – November 2011Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. How Big Business Callously Targets Children, Free Press, US: Simon and Schuster; UK: The Bodley Head, Random House, 2011 I wrote two short pieces –750 words were allowed for each – for newspapers. One was a reflection on Hannah Arendt’s concept “the banality of evil” for a series that The Guardian of London is doing on “Big Ideas.”1 The installment of the series on “the banality of evil” was meant to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, about which Arendt had written her controversial ”Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil” (1963). The second piece was a book review for Toronto’s main newspaper, The Globe & Mail,2 of a book entitled ”Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Callously Targets Children,” which appeared last week from Penguin/Canada. 3 The author is Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who is well-known in Canada and in the U.S. for a best-selling earlier book, The Corporation (2004), on the basis of which he and a big production team made a terrific award-winning documentary, also called The Corporation.  This co-incidence of writing tasks made me think from two different directions about the topic Arendt once called “personal responsibility under dictatorship,” and in this blog I would like to share those thoughts with you –and the two texts as well.Here is what I wrote about Bakan’s book:If a group of legislators or policy-makers concerned to protect children and childhood from being targeted by corporations were looking for a briefing book, a catalogue of abuses, Joel Bakan’s ”Childhood Under Siege” would certainly be the right choice. It  would inform them about the key American fronts of an undeclared corporate anti-child war. But it would not help them analyze the war’s cause, track its history, or strategize their fight. Devoting a chapter to each, Joel Bakan takes up eight areas where corporations and their  advertising departments are pushing developmentally inappropriate and unhealthy goods on kids and lobbying for anti-child policies. He explores, first, the world of video games and online “entertainments”, offering appalling examples of calculated manipulations of children’s love of excitement and their needs for company. Then on to corporations of various sorts purveying a “curriculum” to children. Precociously, they learn about sex from explicit sexual scenes and pornography that are available without check. Sexy clothes and gadgets can be bought by anyone; sexy chat and sexting are free. Violence and  mayhem are ubiquitous. “Ninety percent of [U.S.] children between the ages of four and 1 Guardian.co.uk, Aug.19, 20112 The Globe & Mail, Aug. 26, 2011 3 Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Callously Targets Children, Canada (Penguin), US (Free Press, Simon and Schuster) and UK (The Bodley Head, Random House) 20111 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl | Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. | http://www.hannaharendt.net six are on-screen for at least two hours a day…Tweens and teens spend, on average, eight  hours a day … consuming media.”Big Pharma has found in children the new frontier for selling psychotropics. Doctors and psychiatrists are manipulated into prescribing to children, whose brains are still  developing, all kinds of meds, including anti-psychotics. Big Pharma’s marketing techniques are similar to those of food-producing corporations that market junk food, addicting children to regimes of sugar and caffeine, contributing to zooming rates of  childhood obesity and diabetes and neurological disorders. These corporations are just as oblivious to the harm they are doing to childrens’ health as the environmental polluters responsible for making asthma the leading cause of child hospitalizations and school absences, as one in ten U.S. children suffer from it. Childhood cancers are on the rise, and the main culprits are environmental toxins. Corporations make sure that toxicity standards are made from adult data, while children are vulnerable to toxins at much lower levels. Child labor is slowly being reinstated, particularly in agriculture. Corporations are taking over the field of public education, which was supposed to have become universal with the institution of anti-child labor laws in the early 20th century. Charter schools are subsidized with tax payers’ money for their profit-making enterprises. In a corporation, which is a “person” in U.S. legal terms, the bottom line rules absolutely. Making the maximum for shareholders is a corporation’s legal raison d’être, explains Bakan, a professor of law in Vancouver.  So by its very nature, a corporation will not serve the people or “the commons” that belongs to everyone. This was the theme of Bakan’s 20…best-selling book ”The Corporation” and of a very fine documentary that was made from it. ”Children Under Seige” is an off-shoot of a long section in that book on “the nag factor”—that is, on how corporations set children at odds with their parents, who become powerless as their children are turned into consumers. Because it focuses on children, the current book is more limited than ”The Corporation” was by the way Bakan thinks and by the ‘child saver’ role he wants to play. He is given to utterly simplistic historical and causal statements: The targeting of children can be dated precisely to 1980, he announces, when neoliberalism triumphed and governments stopped regulating corporations. With that, the entire history of child abuse and neglect disappears from view. What is left is a Manichean face-off between Bad Corporations and Good Parents, who have only good intentions toward their children. Swallowed up in the bad “person” of the corporation, CEOs and managers are not persons, and are incapable  of personal responsibility. But as parents those same people will be full of love and caring — and just as helpless in the face of their corporation’s power as any other Good Parent.  All parents, he implies, are like the Bakans, who are described in embarrassingly  schmaltzy terms in the Acknowledgements. They would never do any harm! In the Good Parents/Bad Corporations fantasy Bakan operates with, the Good are rendered powerless by the Bad, and the Bad is unstoppable because it is not made up of  any real people who have real choices and real responsibility toward children and toward  the future children represent. And there are no other adults: no citizens, no legislators, no children’s rights advocates. No political process. In Bakan’s world, no group of legislators  2 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl | Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. | http://www.hannaharendt.net or policy makers would ever gather to read Childhood Under Siege and use it to try to protect children from the anti-child practices it investigates so well. In The Corporation, Bakan’s activist message was: a corporation is a legal entity constituted by a government for a limited period of time; that means a government can dissolve a corporation, particularly if it is behaving destructively, harming the people who are not its shareholders and devastating “the commons.” As the very least, governments can regulate corporations, as they once, to a certain extent, did. So Bakan was calling  upon citizens to get their elected representatives to protect them from corporations. He could, therefore, leave unasked the question: but what about the people inside the corporation, the leaders and the shareholders, have they no insider responsibility? Are  they just functionaries? What sense does it make to say “the corporation did this or that harmful thing,” as though a corporation really were a person making a decision, doing harm.The personal responsibility question left unasked in ”The Corporation” is even more muted in ”Childhood Under Siege: How Corporations Callously Target Children”. The primary audience for this book seems to be parents, in their role as parents, not in their  role as citizens who might act politically against corporations that are turning children into consumers or in their role as insiders in corporations. Without meaning to, I am sure,  Bakan is sending parents, whose goodness and good-will he assumes, the message that  they have been rendered powerless as parents by the corporations. The vicious and sexually debased video games your child is viewing on his electronic device are available  to him no matter what you might try to do to block his access. The food regime you institute at home is no protection against the junk food available everywhere – or the junk added to what you think is good, nutritious food. Environmental toxins are in and around you; you are trapped. Corporate advertising has gotten to your kids and turned them against you, making them into kids who nag you until you give in and buy whatever it is they have been convinced to crave. Family unity has been undermined. This is not a call to  action.The great weakness of Bakan’s book, which is very valuable as documentation, is that he is confused about personal responsibility – he does not know how to think about it or how to write about it. He is right that corporations, as legal entities, encourage people to give up, as it were, their personhood and subsume themselves in the “person” of the corporation, which –metaphorically, but also in actual legal terms—is supposed to make decisions that maximize shareholder profits. So corporate leaders are encouraged not to  consider the impact of their decisions on their customers, or on the environment from which they draw their materials and into which they put their waste products, or on their workers. They are rewarded for considering only the bottom line and for displaying loyalty to the corporate purposes; and, in doing so, they are law-of-the-corporation abiding. But this does not mean that they are not personally responsible; it just means they have chosen not to be personally responsible.An authoritarian regime headed in the direction of being a totalitarian regime operates  like a corporation: it rewards people who abide by its laws, even as those laws morph into laws which make harm and then murder legal and normal and which eventually sanction state-sponsored massacres, administrative massacres (which we now call crimes against   3 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl | Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. | http://www.hannaharendt.net humanity). The bottom line is loyalty to the regime and its interests. But anyone who will not be such a faithful servant has other options: whistle-blowing, sabotage, becoming a resister and – if possible — helping organize a resistance. What people suffer to say no is often dreadful, but they have chosen that form of suffering rather than the suffering of going along in crimes against humanity.Elisabeth Young-Bruehl 4 

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Joel Bakan: Childhood Under Siege. How Big Business Callously Targets Children

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