Two or three years ago a couple of the leading child charities in the UK tried to run publicity posters showing graphic images of children who had been abused. The Advertising Standards Authority banned them on the grounds that the images were too offensive. I was outraged. It isn’t the images that are offensive, for heaven’s sake, it’s the abuse! If that’s what it takes to shake the complacency out of people – to get them to know the extent of the problem and to understand its nature – then so be it.
By comparison, there has been a high profile case recently concerning a couple who abused a little girl in their care, and eventually starved her to death. Today they were sentenced to terms of imprisonment, and the news programmes carried graphic pictures of the child’s injuries. I switched it off because I knew it wouldn’t do the child any good. The poor kid’s gone now. I switched it off because I knew it was merely pandering to the morbid fascination people have for true life horror. I switched it off because the only effect I could see it having was to engender anger towards the perpetrators, which is pointless at this stage. I switched it off because it reminded me of the time when a couple of well meaning charities tried to alert people to this awful condition we have in society, and their attempts were thwarted on the grounds that they were in bad taste.
If the ASA hadn’t been so damned prissy, maybe the public might have been moved to help those charities reduce the incidence of such horrors. Maybe the little girl in question might even have been saved from her ordeal. The sense of priority in the minds of the great British public is in need of radical realignment.
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