Kira Vermond
Financial Post (National Post Online)
You see them at the mall laughing with their friends, standing outside the local movie theatre in cold weather and on the sidewalks facing away from their schools. You see them as young as 12 and 13. You see teenage girls smoking.
Despite all the warnings that smoking-related disease is the number-one killer of women, and that lung cancer has now surpassed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death in women, young women continue to light up.
Although overall smoking rates have declined over the last 25 years, according to the latest Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey conducted by Statistics Canada, in the 15-17 age group, more teenage girls smoked than teenage boys in 2000 - 25 per cent compared to 19 per cent.
The trend of young women smoking early is particularly troubling - simply because the earlier people start smoking, the earlier they become addicted and develop disease related to the habit. Dr. Elinor Wilson, chief science officer for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, says the problem is a global one.
"We're starting to see that, as the world becomes more globalized and westernized, women's smoking rates are going up around the world," she says. "There seems to be a link with equating equality with the freedom to smoke."
Dr. Greaves says women say smoking contributes to their identity, their image, how they manage their emotions and how they feel about taking risks. "They depend on cigarettes as other people depend on a friend or partner," she says.
Weight control and body image is another contentious issue. Tobacco industry critics say cigarette-makers have pushed the ambiguous relationship between slim, healthy women and cigarettes by sponsoring sporting and arts events and sending advertorial magazines directly to young women's homes. "The images portrayed in the marketing about women and smoking are of health, vitality, energy, freedom and freshness," says Dr. Greaves. "All those images are exactly the opposite of what smoking does."
"Canada is considered a leader in developing hard-hitting advertising restrictions and regulations aimed at the tobacco industry, but that does not mean the messages and images do not seep through the cracks" says Dr. Wilson.
"The tobacco industry is very smart and it has a lot of money. Every time you close a door in one place, it finds a window somewhere else," she says.
One of the key ways that young Canadian women encounter tobacco advertising is through popular U.S. magazines. U.S. tobacco companies are no longer permitted to advertise in publications such as Seventeen or YM, but they can in magazines for older audiences. Younger women are still core readers for magazines such as Cosmopolitan, that are not affected by the ban.
Smoking images also travel north from Hollywood, where nine out of ten movies are shipped for English Canadian audiences. A Health Canada program called Mixed Messages stated that the largest increase in images of smoking was depicted in movies with a PG rating - movies created for children and teenagers.
"Our government has made great strides in terms of restricting all that stuff, but it's still there. In some ways, it's on a more difficult level to control because those images are less blatant," Ms. Greaves says.
Faced with the avalanche of pro-smoking images out there, parents can feel helpless when trying to figure out how to keep their children on the straight and narrow. Dr. Wilson suggests that parents talk about their views on smoking, and be adamant about keeping a smoke-free house - and above all, quit smoking themselves. Especially when dealing with their pre-teen and teenage girls, it is important that parents treat them equally and respectfully, making sure that the rules they set for the boys are the same for the girls.
"Lecturing doesn't help. Punishment doesn't help," she cautions. "It's about closeness and communication - and knowing what your kids are going through and facing."
