How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Through our media product we examined the problem of family break up amongst urban youth in deprived areas. Our main protagonist is a young white male in an urban environment. From the outset of this film it is clear to the audience that he has undergone a marital breakdown. We see him packing his belongings and leaving home presumably for an extended period of time, possibly forever. The audience then presumes that he has left his son behind. This raises the social questions of single parent families and young boys growing up without male role models which is a big issue at the moment. Children from broken homes are almost five times more likely to develop emotional problems and are also three times as likely to become aggressive or badly behaved as those with two parents at home, according to a comprehensive survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics published 2008.

Living in a "reconstituted" family containing step-children or step-parents increased the risk of developing behavioural problems still further, it found. The ONS report involved interviewing parents, teacher and children themselves to find out how many suffered emotional problems such as anxiety or depression, how many had "conduct disorders" such as aggression, and what the possible reasons behind them were. After interviewing 5,364 children aged between five and 16 in 2004 and again in 2007, the researchers found that 3 per cent had developed problems over that time. In addition, 30 per cent who had emotional problems at the first survey, and 43 per cent who had behavioural issues, still had them three years later. Children whose parents had split up over the three years were 4.53 times more likely to develop emotional problems than those whose mothers and fathers stayed together, and were 2.87 times more likely to show the onset of behavioural disorders.

This shows what impact our protagonist leaving could have on his son part of a much larger social issue.