More than 30 tobacco brands are advertised or promoted in areas where schools are situated, according to a story in The Jakarta Post citing a recent survey.
The survey was carried out in 360 schools in five major cities including Jakarta, Bandung in West Java and Makassar in South Sulawesi. It was conducted from January to March jointly by Lentera Anak Indonesia, the Children Media Development Foundation and Smoke Free Agents.
The survey found that tobacco advertisements were present in shops ‘around’ 85 percent of all the schools observed, though the Post report did not define what it meant for a shop to be ‘around’ a school.
Billboard advertisements, meanwhile, were said to have been found ‘near’ one out of three schools surveyed.
“We even found in Bandung that a videotron tobacco advertisement was placed right in front of a junior high school,” a researcher from the Communications Department of the University of Indonesia and a survey member, Hendriyani, said during the release of the survey report on Monday.
The researcher warned that tobacco advertisements around schools impacted children’s tendency to smoke. “An estimated 70 percent of children start smoking after seeing advertisements and continue to smoke because of the advertisements as well,” she said.
Based on Global Youth Tobacco Survey data, smoking among Indonesia’s school-age children increased from 12.6 percent during 2006 to 20.3 percent during 2009.
