It's been five years and the Norwegian government is still showing constant ads for its pedo therapy chat service
It's been five years and the Norwegian government is still showing constant ads for its pedo therapy chat service
Although the ads apparently started in or about mid-2020, I myself only first noticed them in late 2023, when I saw an ad for the chat service on a bus stop while out of town. The ad was similar to the one pictured here, but I don't think it was the exact same. Photo credit goes to Fredrik Refvem for Stavanger Aftenblad.
The website's name, "Det Finnes Hjelp", is a bit difficult to translate, but is somewhere between "help is available", "help is possible", "help exists" or just "there is help". And I'm pretty sure I said out loud when I first saw this ad, "Whaddafuckiziss?! lmao" — because up to that point the only other time I'd seen those sorts of big ads claiming to be able to "help you deal with sexual thoughts about children" were like giant highwayside billboards in the middle of the Evangelical boondocks of Seppoland, right next to the ads about fetal heartbeats.
Norway's public broadcaster NRK reported in 2020 that one month after the "Det Finnes Hjelp" campaign began, that it had led 20 pedophiles to seek treatment. Assuming that this has stayed constant since then — which it almost certainly hasn't — then we can estimate that around 750 pedophiles would've sought treatment thanks to this campaign by now. Which is no small number, but is still of course only a small fraction of the actual estimated total number of pedophiles in Norway, which is "around 110,000" according to the ad campaign itself.
Nevertheless, although the efficacy of this program seems dubious, it has only continued to grow more and more prominent since I first became aware of it. I've seen untargeted ads for Det Finnes Hjelp on YouTube regularly (yes, yes, I know, I should use an adblocker) since last year, and these ads have taken two forms:
The first series of YouTube ads looked something like this: a series of dark and somber-looking shots zooming in on people whose faces have been replaced with a broken glass effect. The only audio is ambience and each glass-faced character's line. There's text in the upper right saying that the characters are only actors. It's all a bit creepy and uncomfortable.
The second series of YouTube ads looks something like this: a view of a chatbox on a screen, again the lighting is a bit dim and creepy, and you hear a man panting as he types on a keyboard. This video doesn't have a description.
There's also an ad from the start of the campaign in 2020 that I found in NRK's article about the campaign, but which I never saw myself. It reportedly aired during prime time on TV in mid-to-late 2020.
You may need a VPN to see the video, but I will provide a translated transcript.
So yeah, I dunno. Like it's a bit of a bummer whenever I get these ads, and I can't shake the feeling that there's something "disingenuous" about them when the government responsible for them doesn't really stand to gain anything from actually "defeating" pedophilia... Yet at the same time it is obviously very important to combat child abuse in whatever ways we can, so maybe I shouldn't be so cynical about it, right? Yet it is very difficult to actually concretely measure the efficacy of this sort of program, which makes it the perfect thing to do to "look busy" and rouse National Spirit at the same time.
Do any of you have similar campaigns in your own countries? How do you feel about them?