On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 18:08:52 +0000, Not Responding
wrote in message k:

The ASA have adjudicated on a complaint againts a CTC helmet leaflet.

The leaflet was a joint effort by CTC, London Cycling campaign and
others. We did (And do) dispute the ASA's jurisdiction, since it was
not in any sense a marketing communication, and was distributed to
those involved in the campaign against the Martlew bill - the majority
of those distributed went to MPs and most of the rest to campaigners.

1. objected that the approach used in the leaflet was irresponsible and
could discourage children from wearing helmets;
1. Complaints not upheld

Not least because it begged the question...

2. challenged the claim "The principal threats to children''s lives are
obesity, heart disease and other illnesses resulting in large part from
inactivity ...", because they believed accidents, the subject of the
leaflet, were the greatest threat to children''s lives;
2. Complaints upheld

Although you will note that ASA did not challenge the fact that in
life-years lost, Obesity is massively more significant than cycling.
We could not get them to say who they thought might have been misled
in the way they described, especially among the intended audience.

3. challenged the claim "... the likelihood of serious head injury is
widely exaggerated";
3. Complaints not upheld

Quite so. Note that many of these claims are repeated in the BMA
********, as well as having been slapped down in ASA v BeHIT.

4. challenged the claim "Cycling becomes safer the more people do it.
Encouraging cycling is by far the most effective way of reducing risk of
injury";
4. Complaints not upheld

Which we thought was important :-)

5. challenged the claim "A helmet law would make it a crime for children
to take part in a health giving activity";
5. Complaints upheld

I was never happy with that myself - I could not think of a way of
wording it which was not either clumsy or misleading. In any case,
the Bill would have criminalised parents, not children. But there you
go. Either way, this has some importance, as the helmet laws have
been used in NZ in a discriminatory fashion, with black and Maori
children more likely to be arrested than white kids.

6. challenged the claim "Cycling gives a fitness equivalent to being 10
years younger and a life expectancy 2 years above the average. The
health benefits of cycling far outweigh any risks involved, by a factor
of around 20:1 ... ";
6. Complaints upheld

Which is ********, since we are restating claims which were also
repeated by the BMA in their 1999 report. Much of this originates
with Mayer Hillman, who I venture to suggest knows slightly more about
the subject than the ASA.

7. challenged the claim "It takes over 3,000 years of on-road cycling to
suffer a serious head injury ...";
7. Complaints upheld

That is laughable - how likely is it that anyone reading this claim -
especially anyone in the intended audience of MPs and campaigners well
used to seeing sociological statistics - would interpret this claim in
the strictly literal sense BeHIT propose, that you would never suffer
an injury unless you lived to be 3,000 years old? Given the average
human lifespan that argues a wilful determination to misunderstand!

8. objected that the claim "On other occasions children faced detention
for up to 3 months, tearing families apart" was alarmist, distressing
and exaggerated;
8. Complaints upheld

Unlike BeHIT's helmet videos, which are not alarmist at all really.
Much.

This is based on a single case. Some of us wanted to tone it down a
bit, but there was time pressure.

There is a documented case of a young girl held in jail overnight
because she could not pay the spot fine - I think she was also an
ethnic minority. There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that in
all helmet law jurisdictions, there is a tendency for those form
ethnic minorities to be singled out.

9. challenged whether the claim "The benefits of helmets are greatly
over-stated" was justified;
9. Complaints not upheld

Quite right, too. And that was a major point in the leaflet, unlike
some of the others.

10. challenged whether the leaflet''s criticism of the claims "Cycle
helmets prevent 85% of head injuries and 88% of brain injuries" and
"Over 70% of child cyclist deaths involve head injury" and the claims
"In places where helmet use has become significant, there has been no
detectable reduction in head injuries relative to cycle use ... The
research on which the prediction was made has been widely criticised for
comparing two quite different groups of cyclists" were misleading,
especially because the latter two claims implied objective peer-view
criticism, not opinion;
10. Complaints upheld

Which is bizarre, because they also held in a separate case that these
figures could not be justified!

This refers to a "myths and facts" section. If you look at what they
are saying, and this is also based on the exchanges of letters
beforehand, they do not dispute that the things presented as myths are
(a) claims made by the pro-helmet lobby and (b) insupportable; neither
do they dispute that we have robust evidence to support each of the
claims made as "fact" - their beef was (and for the life of me I
cannot see this) that the acknowledged facts do not negate the
acknowledged myths.

There was a lot of argument about this and they were very clear: they
accept that the myths are myths, that the judgment of them as myths is
largely based on the facts presented, and that the facts are facts,
but not that the facts contradict the myths. Go figure.

11. challenged the claim "www.cyclehelmets.org, an international site
supported by doctors, cycling safety experts, statisticians and people
with professional involvement in helmet design and performance".
11. Complaints upheld

Apparently on the basis that not all doctors agree. Which, as anybody
who knows about the problems of observational studies currently doing
the rounds, will come as no surprise.


The ASA never did say why they thought a political campaign document
should come under their jurisdiction. Neither could they explain how
they could uphold the complaint against the myths and facts section
while actually accepting the facts it contained. Two claims will not
be repeated, or at least not without much more in the way of caveats
(5 and 8). The rest will be used again, because the ASA does not
dispute them, only fine details of the wording.

But then, no doubt BeHIT say the same about the complaint about them.
The difference is, we are only selling scepticism.

Guy
--
"then came ye chavves, theyre cartes girded wyth candels
blue, and theyre beastes wyth straynge horn-lyke thyngs
onn theyre arses that theyre fartes be herde from myles
around." Chaucer, the Sheppey Tales