Child(Hood) Abuse: Constructing the Australian Public in Public Service Advertisements

Abstract

This paper intervenes in debates about the construction of ‘publics' by the media. It traces the way in which one governmental genre of television programming — the public service announcement — attempts the difficult task of constructing a unified sense of ‘the public’ in Western Australia by means of appeals to a supposedly ‘universal’ discourse — that of the protection of children. The paper examines the ways in which these advertisements employ such strategies and discusses the limitations and implications of such appeals by looking at the citizens who are excluded from such a ‘public’.