[size=75:2hfjzz1g]Sofia echo 5 March 2010

Big Brother controversy

Less than three weeks before its launch, Bulgaria’s Big Brother Family show has run into controversy because of its plans to include children among the contestants, with the State Agency for Child Protection and an internet campaign opposing the concept.

According to its website, the show, which launches on Nova Televisia on March 22 and is scheduled to continue for three months, will give the winning family 200 000 leva, an apartment and a car. In a break with previous practice, contestants will be paid salaries for participation, whether or not they win.

The show, which has conducted casting sessions in a number of Bulgarian cities and towns, urged families – married or unmarried with children – to come forward.

Sketching possible candidates, the Big Brother Family website outlines, among others: "
You are the man of the house, with heavy words and a firm hand;
you are a woman, who knows what you want and how to get it…you are a woman who takes care of herself and knows the price of beauty…you are still young, in love and happy"
.

A Facebook site set up by Sofia University staff member Miglena Lalova and entitled, in translation, I am against the involvement of children in Big Brother 5, quotes the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and has more than 5000 members, including foreign citizens resident in Bulgaria. An online petition against the show has been set up on bgpetition.com.

The show, like others in the Big Brother series, will have a resident psychologist, Ani Vladimirova, private tutors for the children, a shop and a restaurant.

Objections to the show have been raised in official channels by the State Agency for Child Protection.

Kalin Kamenov, the agency’s deputy chairperson, told Parliament’s committee on culture, civil society and the media at a hearing on February 24 that the agency believed that the participation of children would have a negative effect on their state of mind.

The artificial environment of a reality television show would alter people’s behaviour, Kamenov told the committee, because parents and children would do what they could in pursuit of the prizes. Official figures gave the average monthly income of Bulgarians in December 2009 as just more than 331 leva.

Kamenov was quoted by Bulgarian news agency Focus as having said in an interview that the agency had written to the show’s producers insisting that all provisions of the Bulgarian media code of ethics – which includes provisions about children – be observed.

The agency also asked whether the show’s producers and the television station would provide accessible and full information about the children’s emotional condition, and had asked for guarantees against the "
manipulative and mercantile"
employment of children on the show.

The agency was insisting that parents were made aware of their responsibility to provide proper conditions for the normal physical and even moral development of their children.
The Council for Electronic Media had been asked to monitor the show, and if "
God forbid"
there were any undesirable incidents, the agency would intervene, Kamenov said.