Larvatus Prodeo

crossposted

Author Note: The original title of this post was “Do the right thing, Mainstream Media: disguise the faces of the minors in your reproductions of the Henson images NOW”, deliberately imperative because I wanted it to grab attention in people’s feed readers and hopefully provoke an immediate reaction. That has happened, the faces are now being pixellated in the mass media (not that I’m claiming that this is a direct result of this post), so I’m changing the title to something that sounds a bit more like “me” speaking.

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The Age has an article quoting the mother of the girl whose image is the most widely disseminated with respect to the investigation of complaints against artist Bill Henson’s nude studies of adolescents. The mother defends Henson against claims that he did anything unethical, and mentions in a statement given to The Age via an intermediary that he has been a friend of the family for over 10 years, that her daughter has “a keen interest in the arts” and that the whole family were well acquainted with Henson’s work before the photo-shoot.

The Age claims to have discovered that the pictures were taken last year, and that the girl is still 13 years of age. That contradicts earlier reports that the images were several years old, which would have made the girl perhaps now 16 or 18, i.e. possibly made her no longer a minor. If The Age is correct, then she is still very much under-age, and I’m pretty sure that that creates a problem for the media who have disseminated Henson’s images of her online and in the press, or at least it certainly should.

I only yesterday realised that the censored images of Henson’s work readily available online mostly lack one key ingredient that we usually see when images of minors are at the heart of a news cycle about alleged sexual exploitation/abuse - there has been no black bar or pixellation over the face to disguise the minor’s identity.

Why the hell not? Continue reading ‘Privacy rights in Child Protection investigations: the need for the mass media to disguise identifying features on the minors in the Henson images’