By Simon Chapman Ph.D. and Sonia Wutzke BSc (Psych) Hons
Published in Australian & New Zealand Journal of Public Health 1997;21:614-20
If there was any exposure to the RFR emitting from the transmitters, anyone within the immediate vicinity would have been exposed. However all news coverage concentrated solely on the children in the kindergarten said to be at risk. Later when the transmitters were moved adjacent to a club frequented by elderly patrons, the outrage re-emerged in further media stories. Towers throughout Australia sited in factory grounds, in the back of firebrigade stations or beside highways have attracted little community outrage.
There was no suggestion in any of the reportage that the children were currently experiencing health problems from being exposed to the towers. The parents concerns were about future consequences. Conceptually, this component appears close to the primary component “true hazard unknowable.”
Being adjacent to a kindergarten, the alleged potential victims of the Telstra RFR were not seen by the protesters nor the media as random, hypothetical, faceless or “statistical” victims. Rather the principal victims were seen to be a finite group of identifiable children. Television news reports repeatedly showed groups of children playing and featured sound bites from their parents who spoke up defending people seen to be attacking their children.
With the high prevalence of mobile phone ownership in Australia, it is possible if not likely that some of the protesters, especially the politicians, were themselves mobile phone users. However, this probability — with its potential for a powerful newsworthy sub-text of hypocrisy -- was never raised in any media reports nor by news commentators. One reason for this may have been that the protests were directed at the towers, and not at the phones themselves. Any perceived RFR risks in the phones would, by Sandman’s model, have been ameliorated by phone ownership reflecting personal choice and control and bringing obvious direct benefit to users. The towers, however, while being essential to the phones’ operation, could be emotionally dissociated from any act of personal phone use and thereby not perceived as having any immediate personal benefit to the protesters.
Mobile phone towers have proliferated in Australia in recent years. Prior to this incident, we are unaware of any protests by residents about such towers. The Harbord protest commenced within two weeks after the major Four Corners television investigation of health risks from mobile phones. That program may well have stimulated the residents’ concerns.
While there were other transmission towers in the area, the protest was organised around only one. The protesters had as their goal the removal of the facility from the vicinity of the kindergarten -- it could not be in their children’s “backyard", but presumably, somewhere else would have been considered a satisfactory solution. Those claiming to be in danger were a small group with
Within two weeks of the initial protest, Telstra agreed to relocate the base station. In its press release, the company “... concluded that the community had rejected the scientific evidence provided by Government instrumentalities” but acquiesced to the depth of community feeling against the facility.
Citing national interest, the Australian Government has given Telstra and the two other mobile phone service carriers extraordinary legal exemption from needing to seek planning approval from local governments for the siting of their antennae. This exemption allows the companies virtually free reign to locate their towers on the property of any landowner who will accept them. With lucrative annual rental fees payable to local businesses, churches and community groups willing to accept a tower on their land, there has no been shortage of sites to install towers.23
Telstra thus operated entirely within a specially promulgated Federal law in siting its towers without engaging in the usual legal process of exposing its building plans for comment to local residents. By being privileged to stand “outside” the law, Telstra enjoyed carte blanche to install towers, but thereby became an exemplary coercive agency in the eyes of those who would have ordinarily have been protected by legal process.
Once the protest erupted, Telstra’s main tactic appeared to be one of seeking to emphasise the extremely low levels of RFR that were detectable from the towers, and to compare these emissions to EMR emissions from ordinary, familiar household objects.
The critical point here, is that Sandman’s model predicts that familiar objects tend not to generate outrage, while exotic objects like the transmission towers do. When Telstra -- which had become through its coercive actions an untrustworthy source -- sought to compare its Brave New World towers with trusted, tried-and-true household objects, for many their analogies would have seemed redolent with a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing degree of mistrust. Here we emphasise the interaction of the “coercion,” “exotic,” and “untrustworthy sources” components of Sandman’s model.
As shown, this episode attracted considerable media attention. It became a lead story in both local, state and interstate news. Besides the newsworthy components of outrage discussed above, the story appeared to be carried by a powerful David vs Goliath sub-text. Combined with the “danger in the familiar” and the quasi-Frankensteinian metaphor of technological creations striking back at those who are lured by their attractions, these subtexts would have made the story newsworthy independently of its particular content (mobile phones). In these respects it represented the re-telling of an age-old story framed in classic mythological terms.24 25
Our case study is replete with examples which illustrate near total consistency between Sandman’s theory of risk perception and the Harbord kindergarten incident. The review of media transcripts would appear to confirm Sandman’s model that community risk assessment is characterised by components of outrage. There were several components of the model that, while potentially relevant to this case study, were not evident from any of the media transcripts. These were that:
 |
the health consequences were described by neither the protesters nor the media as being catastrophic |
| |
there was no suggestion of mutagenic effects or of any future generations being affected |
| |
there was no suggestion that the situation was in some way preventable (for example, the view that health risks from mobile phones were too high a price to pay for their convenience was never broached) |
While the great majority of the components of Sandman’s model were satisfied by this case study, the model appears to lack utility in addressing questions of whether there is any hierarchy in the significance of the components. As illustrated by the previous discussion of the interaction of components, any ambition to separate out the components from one another risks a retreat into a sterile reductionism26 that would not accord with the reality of this interaction. However, it is reasonable to ask whether there are any dominant components to the model, which if addressed, might render the other components far less predictive of outrage.
For example, had Telstra eliminated the “coercion” component by engaging in a thorough process of community consultation, would this have neutralised the overall outrage and thereby rendered the other components of the model insignificant? And equally, had Telstra done so, would the protesters have been able to maintain decisive media interest in their case on the basis of recourse to emphasis of the remaining components?
In February 1996, this controversy remained very much alive in several areas of Sydney. For example, one local council passed regulations which set different minimum distances within which mobile phone towers could not be located (if on an “industrial” site >300 metres from residences; >450 metres from any childcare facility, a school, a hospital aged care centre or recreational facility) (correspondence received by SC).
These regulations reflect a decidedly curious model of radiation susceptibility, to say the least: any health consequences from RFR cannot somehow discriminate between someone in a house and in an office or factory, and it is simply nonsensical to codify in regulations that children can be exposed from distances of more than 450m while at school, but from 300m while at home, given that children spend more time at home that in school. Equally, why are children and the aged considered comparable groups in terms of their vulnerability to RFR in these resolutions? Most of the claims that are made about the health consequences of RFR exposure concern long term health consequences such as cancer. Given that people in aged care centres have, compared to the general population and particularly to children, have few years to live, what health consequences are being proposed as a possible consequence of RFR exposure to those in aged care facilities?
These peculiar resolutions would seem to reflect the council’s attempt at assuaging community concerns in that it incorporated distinctions between domestic and industrial exposures, and between population groups generally considered “vulnerable” and the (residential) population at large. Many people, on hearing that towers can be located nearer factories and homes than (for example) child care centres would assume this to be a sensible policy.
It is one thing to acknowledge that community perceptions are at the core of community concerns, but quite another to base siting policy base on differential zoning on those perceptions as if they somehow reflected a rational assessment of potential risk. Sandman’s model provides many insights into when community outrage might be predicted. His writings and video presentations also provide suggested pathways by which each of the elements of community outrage might be ameliorated in situations where the outrage is out of all proportion to actual hazard [17, 18, 19]. Sandman might himself be outraged at the thought that elements of his model have apparently been so crudely appropriated by local governments seeking compromises between resident concerns and facilitating the amenity afforded by mobile phone access.
Part 1: Abstract Background Risk = Hazard + Outrage Primary Components
Part 2: Secondary Components Telstra’s response to outrage Discussion Postscript
Part 3: Appendix 1: Bibliography
|
Peter M. Sandman
59 Ridgeview Rd. Princeton NJ 08540-7601 |
Phone: 1-609-683-4073
Fax: 1-609-683-0566 Email: peter@psandman.com |
 |
|
Website design and management provided by SnowTao Editing Services. |
||