Arts blurred lines of child pornography

Artist Bill Heson

Art has long pushed the boundaries, provoked thought and created controversy, but some art may have pushed a little too much and shown more than what is legal. A no better example is the Bill Henson affair, a man regarded as a visionary who has for the last 30 years has used obscure landscapes and adolescence awkwardness to depict the evolution of a child becoming an adult. His pictures often depict bare emotions taken when the child looks most vulnerable. However just as art pushes boundaries, in some people’s opinions, Henson may have pushed the boundaries till his images verged on child pornography. The result was that the NSW police raided Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery pulling down parts of his display and the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd calling the images ‘revolting’.
So as Henson’s photos went from the Gallery to the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, one must beg the question when does art of children become pornography? Laws in Australia prevent nipples being shown on magazine covers let alone other parts of women’s bodies, but the photos in question, showed a girl with fully exposed breast and a glimpse of other parts that would normally be wrapped inside the plastic cover of a ‘Playboy’ magazine. When speaking with lawyer Ceaser Mendita explained that child pornography’s definition is ‘the sexual exploitation or sexual content of a child under 16 or 18 depending on the state’. A further difficulty is that there are no set guidelines.
So if you cannot appear naked in a men’s magazine until you are18 years of age, but for artistic purposes you can use children in naked images, it seems that the use of children for artistic purposes is being left up to the interpretation of the individual. To safeguard our children should we as a country have laws in place that give us the guidelines that let us cross check if a picture is in breach of Child Pornography laws as the have in Britain? Or perhaps we should be addressing the people in our society who are offended by art such as this and take from it a sexual message rather than an artist depicting the natural evolution of adolescence.

The blured lines of Art and Child porn- by luke spring