Scientists agree that the human brain is still in development well into its 20s, and the poor judgment of young people has a biological basis. Yet there’s a cruel streak of social piety that viciously condemns the young for making decisions as badly as young people do. I’ve often thought it’s informed by resentment at what’s perceived by the older, the burdened and the compromised to be the broader opportunities available to those young enough to remain largely uncommitted.

This was, at least, my working theory last week, at the time 60 Minutes decided to feed on Cassandra Sainsbury. She’s the 22-year-old arrested in Colombia, facing charges for allegedly trying to smuggle 5.8kg of cocaine out of Bogotá in boxes of headphones.

Schapelle Corby – the story won't go away and neither will the media Read more

60 Minutes didn’t use its platform to remind viewers that the more you isolate young people from the wisdom of altruistic elders, the worse their decisions become. The program instead went for a bloodthirsty personal attack on Sainsbury, parading around unreliable sources as well dangerous, demonising stereotypes associating sex workers with criminals. It won its ratings time slot – good for 60 Minutes, if not for Sainsbury, sex workers, young people or anyone else watching the program.

Turns out I vastly underestimated tabloid-TV relish for viciousness when I was tut-tutting the cruel sensationalism of 60 Minutes last week. The convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby has returned to Australia, having served jail time and supervised release in Indonesia after 4.2kg of cannabis was found plastic-wrapped in her her bodyboard bag back in 2004, when she was 27.

The media’s furious pursuit of Corby has demanded military-grade security, double-booked flights and even one reporter giving live updates – I am not joking, this actually happened – while harnessed into the back of a ute, tailing Corby as she went to meet her parole officers. As Australians, we should know by now there’s a national standard for anything going too far, and that’s Karl Stefanovic staging an intervention. We are indeed in a very dangerous new media realm when 60 Minutes tactics seem subtle in comparison.

Watching the treatment of Sainsbury that escalated so quickly for Corby, I’m forced to conclude it’s not mere envy of youth that drives these stories. Whatever the outcome of her sentence, in public terms it’s Corby’s tragedy that she remained so photogenic throughout her incarceration.

One struggles, beyond the tragic Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, to remember the names of the rest of the Bali Nine – the eldest of whom was only 29 at the time of their arrest, the youngest barely 18. A gross awareness is unavoidable that in both Sainsbury and Corby’s cases, someone’s decided that these young women are sexy in a way that mass markets understand, and both should now be appropriately crucified for it. How else to explain sex worker allegation – other than it’s got the word “sex” in it. Would she be the subject of a 60 Minutes “special investigation” if she looked like the author of this article?

As it turns out, a study at the University of Maryland determined as long ago as 1975 that people meted out out harsher punishments to women perceived to be trading on their looks – like, perhaps, charming their way through airport security – to get away with crime.

The impossible, oft-repeated advice that women should “be sexy, but no too sexy” rings in the ears like an alarm when presented with media narratives of young women at the mercy of their own poor decisions. Centuries of mythology from the Greeks to the Christian bible and Qur’an insist that beautiful women are a trick to lure men to ruination, and you don’t need to go as far as an MRA Reddit thread to understand how deeply these myths maintain their psychocultural hold on so many. How satisfying it must be to watch personal disaster brought upon something you have been culturally convinced to believe will wreak disaster on you. A ratings winner.

How convenient, too, to focus on ancient tropes of woman-hating, and women as agents of something nefarious, rather than confront the scale of nefariousness in which so many Australians are complicit and in which these women are pawns.

Cassie Sainsbury: another accused drug mule, another Australian soap opera | Alana Schetzer Read more

Because while we fixate on Corby or Sainsbury, we’re not teasing out the details of how cannabis can be both illegal and yet so normalised there’s a market of Australians who’ll risk the jail time of others to enjoy it on holiday. We’re not examining the Australian appetite for an exotic, pricey product like cocaine – so valuable and in demand that mules risk double-decade prison sentences to deliver it.

Tabloid television isn’t pursuing a special investigation of culpability of current recreational drug users – or the complicity of tough-on-drugs, prohibitionist laws that criminalise those who serve the supply of others’ kicking back, out-of-hours good time. Australia now has the highest rate of recreational drug use in the world, with 40% of Australians admitting to use of illicit drugs. Within the prime-time audiences feasting on the misadventures of Sainsbury and Corby are large cohorts likely to have sampled their other wares. These statistically significant propositions, of course, apply to those producing the news coverage as well.

So let’s make sure we don’t kid ourselves that any of this sensationalism results from popular repulsion against reefer madness, or pious judgments towards wicked cocaine. It’s those who can get away with their own sins and errors, punishing the women who can’t. It’s young women in trouble, far from home and in jail, while wiser adults will indulge their pleasures, tangible and vicarious, with much safer calculations of the risks.