The Hunger Games: media hype and social marketing

Yet, it is a sad reality for many young teenagers. Australian researcher Maggie Hamilton's book What's Happening to our Girls, reveals an increasing number of mums are allowing their daughters, as soon as they get their periods, to get Brazilian waxes.

Yes, The Hunger Games is violent. The Herald Sun's Susie O'Brien ("Standing up for families" is her tag line) has decried it as "a violent and nihilistic social commentary that makes Harry Potter look like Teletubbies." (Herald Sun 27 Mar 2012). What's more, she has declared; "it is not a movie kids should see."

Indeed, it is a bleak, dystopian book and movie, but then so is William Golding's famous 1954 novel Lord of the Flies which has become "a classic" - but that doesn't take away from the fact its plot is "kids gone wild" and that children kill other children without adults around to set the rules.

British Board Of Film Classification head of policy David Austin maintains that Lord Of The Flies is even bleaker than The Hunger Games. "[In this case] children are forced against their will to take part in this competition. In Lord Of The Flies certain children revert to their natural state."

This was my 13 year-old-son's view as well. Despite O'Brien's warning, I let him see the movie ("it was exciting but the characterization in the novel was much better," he said). Was he traumatised? He rolled his eyes, laughed and told me the book was far more violent "and I read that for school when I was only 12". He said the plot of The Lord of the Flies, which he had also studied, was worse "because there is no reason the kids have to hurt each other, they just do."

Indeed, what savagery are young people capable of when they are forced into such a situation? Just look at Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army – which is listed by the US as a terrorist organization. The group is notorious for kidnapping children, forcing the boys to become fighters and using girls as sex slaves. Not so removed from Collins' world of Panem in the ruins of what was once North America.

Perhaps that is why teachers such as Anne Soter a professor of Literacy and Language Education at Ohio State University, have lobbied for The Hunger Games to be put on the school curriculum. She says the book is "full of issues that students need to talk about," and they usually "don't have role models for this anymore."

Yes, The Hunger Games, like The Lord of the Flies, is bleak and violent. Collins adds to her contemporary version of dystopia a world where the media uses and packages teenagers to inflate ratings, demanding they perform like simplistic, easily recognizable and easy to package "brands". Young audiences know and understand this all too well – and 3.5 million "likes" can't be wrong.