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Reality TV sparks review of child performance laws

The coalition Government is to conduct a review into the UK's child performance laws amid concerns over the effects of appearing in reality television programmes, children's minister Tim Loughton revealed last week.

Mr Loughton, who was speaking at the International Association for the Study of Attachment conference in Cambridge, said, 'There is a growing need to look again at our child performance laws, which date back to the 1960s. That is something that I will be undertaking in the autumn, together with the rather antiquated legislation on child employment'.

He referred to a controversial Channel 4 programme called 'Boys and Girls Alone', which left a group of pre-adolescent children to fend for themselves as an 'experiment'. Mr Loughton said that the programme 'sparked fierce debate about a kind of engineered Lord of the Flies type of scenario' and stressed the importance of adhering to basic child psychology principles when involving young people in television programming.

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