http://www.care2.com/causes/womens-rights/blog/tobacco-companies-work-to-hook-young-women-in-developing-countries-on-cigarettes/In a fascinating and rather devastating new study, the Global Adult Tobacco Survey revealed that although 80 percent of the world's tobacco smokers are men, young women in developing countries are being increasingly targeted by tobacco companies eager to hook more customers.
According to an article in the LA Times, the World Health Organization "has estimated that the rate of female smokers worldwide will double by 2025, from about 9 percent in 2007. The current male smoking rate of about 40 percent has peaked and is slowly starting to decline. Increases among female smokers have been documented in a number of countries, including India, Singapore, the Ukraine and Russia." The gap between very young men and women who begin smoking at an early age is also shrinking - about 7 percent of girls smoke, as opposed to 12 percent of boys.
It's interesting to me that this issue seems to be so gendered - and the ways that cigarette companies are targeting women are also very insidious. According to Johanna Birckmayer, director of international research at Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the advertising uses "ideas of independence and emancipation" as well as glamour and sex appeal, to sell smoking. The risk to women is also arguably greater, simply because smoking during pregnancy is very dangerous. Disturbingly, in China (apparently the home of most of the world's smokers), more than half of all women of childbearing age are forced to regularly breathe secondhand smoke.
In a post on Broadsheet, Christine Mathias points out that the issue of smoking is much more problematic in developing countries - women may not have access to adequate incentives not to smoke. "With incredibly high numbers of male smokers in these regions," Mathias writes, "no national campaigns to guilt people into quitting, and very few restrictions on advertising and marketing, not smoking begins to lose its luster."
It's important not to forget that these smoking campaigns seem to be hurting men as well, and that any outreach about smoking should not focus exclusively on women. But it does seem crucial to find ways to inform young women in developing countries that they can be independent and empowered and sexy, but that they don't need cigarettes to do so - and that smoking is not glamorous. It seems incredibly sad that for these young women, some of the most seemingly empowering messages are actually being peddled by gigantic corporations that simply want to get them hooked on a substance that could kill them.
Topic: Tobacco Companies Work To Hook Young Women In Developing Countries on Cigarettes (Read 496 times)