Youth advocate finds competition open to young girls distasteful

The exploitation of our young girls and women must stop!

 

Executive Secretary of the Caribbean Congress of Community Practitioners Nichole Murray made this clear yesterday as she spoke on a social media advertisement of a dancing competition to win two VIP tickets for an upcoming concert.

 

The competition requires entrants to show off their ‘Culu Culu’ dancing skills, by recording themselves dancing and uploading the video to Facebook and Instagram with the video receiving the most likes winning.

 

The advertisement, which accompanies a video with a scantily dressed woman doing the ‘Culu Culu’, outlines that while participants should be 18 or older, those under 16 can compete as long as they have authorisation from an adult or guardian.

 

Calling this “disgusting”, Murray heavily chastised the organizers of the event, insisting that the ad be taken down and a public apology be issued against such disregard for women.

 

“For these promoters to say if you are under 16 yrs you are free to enter, it means that they have no regard for children or for children’s rights or for dignity of young females. ‘So it doesn’t matter if you are a child or an adult, we just want the interest for our event.’ It just disgusted me,” the Organizer of Volunteer Barbados asserted.

 

She told The Barbados Advocate that wider society must see the value of promoting women positively, and not seek to continuously exploit women in a sexual manner as some young females were beginning to believe “that this is all they are worth”.

“I and several other women work hard every week doing sessions with girls to help empower them and to show them that they are valuable and things like these only push back what we are doing ten steps. One event like this can tear down what we have been doing in the schools for the last two years,” the youth advocate lamented.

 

Murray therefore encouraged the sponsors of the event to withdraw their backing unless an apology was issued.

 

“I want Bajans to stand up and say we do not agree with this. I want the organizers apologize to the public, take the promotion down immediately and make it clear that this event is a positive cultural event and not something smutty,” she stressed. (JMB)