The NSW government have released a set of recommendations that would place responsibility for the work of a grubby network of international paedophiles and child exploiters on a handful of innocent visual artists.
Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday the Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said the NSW government would support new legislation that makes a “clear legal distinction between pornography and art” in order to protect victims and make it easier for police to prosecute cases of child pornography and exploitation
With plans to scrap the defence of “artistic merit” while asking artists to fork out up to $500 per image for Commonwealth classification, Hatzistergos’ recommendations are taking a stab at a group, who up until 2008 had stayed fairly shy of scrutiny in Australia.
First there was the huge public response to the Bill Henson scandal of 2008 when police stormed a Paddington art gallery and closed down his exhibition after claims he’d used pornographic images of children. Closely followed by Kevin Rudd’s threat to pull the funding for Art Monthly magazine after a photograph of six-year old Olympia Nelson that was taken by her photographer mother Polixeni Papapetrou, appeared on its cover.
While the debate that ensued in response to these stories make them hard to forget, it’s equally important to remember that all charges against Henson were subsequently dropped and Olympia Nelson staged her own press conference to directly voice her offence at the PM’s accusations.
And why is the government ringing the alarm at the art world when even Tamara Winikoff the executive director of National Association for Visual Arts who “cautiously” supported Mr Hatzistergos, told the SMH online: ‘It’s really very rarely artists’ work can be considered to be in danger of being child pornography.’‘
It’s also important to consider what the NSW government recommendations are leaving out because their proposal allows some pretty generous leeway for the rest of society when it comes to pointing the finger and protecting our children’s innocence.
What about the impact of magazine advertising for instance, where not only is it common to see young girls sexualised as models for high street fashions or make-up, it’s also proven to have a dire effect on their self esteem. Or violent television programming, a much more likely source of un-supervised entertainment for children than an art gallery where gruesome and gory murders and sex scenes are an accepted part of the 8:30pm movie. Or even more importantly, what about kids and their access to the internet?
Back in 2008, the Australian Federal Police led one of the largest child pornography investigations ever conducted after a tip-off on a European website that had posted a series of pornographic images featuring children attracted 12 millions hits in 76 hours; with 2,800 unique browsers coming from Australian IP addresses.
Ninety people were summoned to court as a result of these findings – and among the 70 arrested was a police officer and several teachers. Four children were removed from homes of their dependants and thousands of DVDs and computers were confiscated.
Mick Keelty, the police commissioner leading the investigation told reporters the pornographic material stood out in terms of both the brutality of the violence and desperate anonymity of the victims.
“These are not children in passive positions. These are children who are being abused. The real tragedy of this is that we don’t know the origins of a lot of these children. We don’t know whether these children are still being the victims of child abuse,” he said.
Not only did this investigation confirm that there’s an enormous market for child pornography, with an alarmingly large following in Australia, it showed that the predators were everywhere, some holding down respectable jobs in the community, a fact that makes it impossible to confine them to a specific group or section of society.
So before we agree to any change of legislation that could see our humble artists suffocated for creative license or short of yet another buck, let’s not lose sight of that.
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