November 27, 2006
Is It Child Porn or Is It Censorship?
Uncertain of the legal risks, Saskatoon-based periodical BlackFlash left out the illustrations for a story on Canada's child pornography legislation
In what BlackFlash managing editor Lissa Robinson calls "an act of self-censorship," the magazine's six-member editorial committee agreed earlier this month to eliminate the reproductions of two 19th-century paintings of children, four photographs, including one 1879 pre-pubescent nude study by Alice in Wonderland creator Charles Dodgson, and a 1995 advertisement for Calvin Klein clothing. The decision came after a time-consuming search failed to turn up a printer willing to risk a test of the Child Pornography Act passed in July, 2005.
Much of the pre-publication debate at BlackFlash focused on a 1991 photograph by the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Called, variously, Rosie and Honey...
BlackFlash planned to run the Mapplethorpe as a full-page image. But when the magazine's lawyer indicated that this illustration and others might run afoul of child-porn statutes...the editors started to argue about which pictures may be considered pornographic by the law and which wouldn't.
In the end, Robinson said, the board voted to kill all seven, "partly to make a political point and partly because we didn't want to put our printer at risk."
"No one at [BlackFlash] or any artist for that matter is disputing the legitimate right of Parliament and the police to enact and enforce child-pornography laws. It's a question of whether artistic endeavours . . . will be exempted from such laws."
from Growing Up Sexually
Posted by Stubbornson at November 27, 2006 03:49 PM