Children's rights are never simple and always subject to impassioned debate. We have just had such a debate about artistic integrity, and whether populist reactions to nude photographs of children are simply prurience or prudishness disguising the horned censor.
The editor of Arts Monthly has just hanged himself in an extension of that debate, using his own perceived artistic licence.
Of course, art has its special place and must be free. Ads, on the other hand, which involve not art but money and status, should not. Children shouldn't pay for either place.
The owners of the NSW gallery hosting the Bill Henson exhibition last month were either looking for publicity or, more likely, naïve, by placing these images not only on the exhibition invitation, but online as well. This took Henson's photographs out of (artistic) context and put them before people they might well disturb and provoke.
No one wants to go back to the bad old days of discretionary censorship by prudish police. Yet that is how the original argument ran: is it art, or is it obscene, and if so should someone be prosecuted? The natural reaction is no, and as a result nobody conceptualised this as a child protection issue. But beneath the rhetoric of artistic integrity and presumed wowserim, that's what it was.
Despite the dropping of the investigation, the arts community's umbrella body voluntarily undertook to develop its own protocols for artists' use and representation of immature child models — that is, of children who are probably unable to make consistently reliable decisions to protect themselves from exploitation.
This fluctuating competency is the only modern reason for lifting the age of consent to sexual relations from the Common Law age of ten to 16, while the age of full adult competence remains 18. Modern children may be more knowing but yet unwise, which is why our law makes youth a reason for both extra protection and more adult responsibility in dependency relationships. Parents continue to be foolish, sometimes, too.
Once police decided that the Henson photographs were not 'obscene', this issue of child protection still breathed within a small party of co-authors of a letter, of which I was one, who maintained that the real issue was not pornography or paedophilia, but the lack of ethical integrity in exploiting children for adult purposes.
Then the editor of Arts Monthly shot down the arts community's smart