I’m not quite sure what sort of information Ofsted found so worthy of note. Perhaps it was buried somewhere in the article ‘My Boyfriend Gave Me Herpes’ or ‘I Had a Fling with My Physics Teacher’.
It’s certainly a sad state of affairs if we have come to depend on such gossip-mongering, celebrity-baiting fare to give our children the lowdown on the birds and the bees. But it’s no surprise that many mags aimed at teenage girls resort to lurid headlines to attract readers. Recently the market has seen a drastic drop in sales, and spin-offs from Cosmopolitan and Elle that were pitched at a younger audience have folded.
Good riddance, you may say – and with good reason. Many girls who admit to having under-age sex say that one of the reasons they do it is out of low self-esteem. As one survey of 2,000 British teenage girls found, 70 per cent disliked their faces and only 8 per cent were happy with their bodies. Two-thirds thought their lives would improve dramatically if they lost weight. The constant parade of stick-thin models in the pages of these mags, and their endless tips on diet and beauty, do take their toll.
So, what do we do? What the church does best. Not finger-wagging, not moral crusading, but offering a vibrant, positive alternative. Thank goodness, then, for Gracemag! Launched next month, Gracemag is a quarterly magazine for girls, produced by Christians, which forgoes who’s-hot-and-who’s-not lists for features on planning the perfect sleepover and how to fight climate change, and meditations on the Psalms – among much else.
It may not boast the latest scoop on Paris Hilton but, rather than leaving its readers feeling worthless, it will seek to live up to its title in helping them to recognise just how precious they really are.
Jason Gardner
For more info on Gracemag, or to subscribe, click here.
Reproduced with permission: © The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity
