Talk:Indecent photograph of a child

Can someone add a picture to this article?


 * I would if it wasn't illegal. Skinnyweed 19:10, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

I wonder whether we should merge Indecent photograph of a child with Indecent pseudo-photograph of a child? Secretlondon 11:15, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Is there any information about the 5 different categories of indecent images, level 1 being the least explicit and level 5 being the most explicit? 195.137.69.6 (talk) 14:37, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

OR editorializing
This is all OR, cites no references, and none of it is written in encylopedic style.-PetraSchelm (talk) 21:29, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

"A pseudo-photograph is an image that appears to be a photograph. A true photograph does not appear to be a photograph, it simply is one. Despite all the tricks that a photographer can use (multiple exposures, unusual angles, time delay, etc), a photograph is taken to be a record of a state of affairs that actually existed at a particular time, even though that state of affairs might have been extremely fleeting. A true photograph has not been tampered with or edited in any way.

Bearing in mind some of the arguments made in favour of the criminalisation of pseudo-photographs - in particular that a pseudo-photograph might lead to an investigation to ascertain whether or not the child shown in it was actually abused - it is clear that their main thrust is that a pseudo-photograph is a realistic image: a pseudo-photograph appears to show reality, but in actual fact depicts a state of affairs that never existed.

As an example, take the promotional poster created for the film Pretty Woman in which Julia Roberts' head is superimposed on an anonymous model's body. Taken on its own it is convincingly realistic - but the knowledge that the body is not Mrs Roberts' reveals the image to be a "pseudo-photograph". That image was presumably created on a computer or with very careful application of some very delicate scissors and some large photographs of Mrs Roberts' head and the model's body.

In addition to images composed by manipulating images of real people, objects or scenes, there are also images that consist completely of computer generated imagery - for example scenes from The Lord of the Rings films in which the Gollum character appears. There are many other scenes from those films that are convincingly realistic but show things one knows never existed as real objects or actors placed before a camera.

A pseudo-photograph, then, is an image that is realistic enough to be taken as showing a historical state of affairs but something external to the image itself reveals this not to be the case."

In the case of an image showing Estes' "Water Taxi, Mount Desert" image for example, art historians could state that the image shows a famous painting, or the jury may even decamp to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art to view the painting for itself.

Might the logic from the Fellows & Arnold decision therefore mean that a photograph of a painting is a copy of a pseudo-photograph? In a word, no: a copy of a pseudo-photograph must represent the original pseudo-photograph in another form.

A realistic image is only a pseudo-photograph when it appears to be a photograph. Photographing a painting might create an image that lacks many of the elements that show the original image to be a painting: the size, frame, brush strokes, etc. But a photograph of a painting remains a "photograph" - and therefore a copy of it remains a "copy of a photograph". Nothing happens to make the photograph stop showing a real scene containing a painting and start showing a false scene that appears real: the image does not become a pseudo-photograph.

But any modification to the image will result in a pseudo-photograph being made.

Works of Art as pseudo-photographs?
It is important to note that, under UK law, there is no restriction on the manner in which a pseudo-photograph can be created save that it cannot be made in the same way as a photograph. Any image that is photo-realistic but not photographic can be considered to be a pseudo-photograph.

This gives rise to the possibility that the work of various artists can be considered pseudo-photographs, for example artists in the Photo-realism movement.

The "Water Taxi, Mount Desert" image by Richard Estes is known to be a painting. Since it is photo-realistic, is it therefore also a pseudo-photograph?

When presented as a painting it might not appear to be a photograph - the scale of it, its location in an art gallery, visible brush strokes, etc might preclude that judgement. But what of a scaled down version of it? It is an image that appears to show a real state of affairs, but the knowledge that it is an image showing a painting prevents us from describing it as a photograph.

Is it, therefore, a pseudo-photograph?

While Act does not define how a pseudo-photograph IS made, it does tell us how it is NOT made: a pseudo-photograph is NOT taken.

It is a presumption of statutory interpretation that different words have different meanings and it was thought necessary to add the concept of pseudo-photography to the legislation. Since Parliament does nothing in vain, a pseudo-photograph is not a photograph.

The Oxford Concise English Dictionary defines a photograph as "a picture made by a camera". A pseudo-photograph, then, is an image that appears to be a photograph but which was not made with a camera.

Clearly, such an image can be described only as a photograph of a painting, not as a pseudo-photograph (according to the 1978 Act, "data stored on a computer disk" can constitute a photograph - by definition, if a photograph is scanned, it remains a photograph).

This results in a situation in which the reason for the introduction of the pseudo-photograph concept is exactly inverted: an image that appears to show a child in an indecent situation cannot be prosecuted, this time because it is a photograph (a photograph is an indecent photograph of a child if it is indecent and if it shows a child - in this case an image could be indecent but would in fact show another image, not a child).

Merge proposal

 * Discussion located at: Talk:Protection of Children Act 1978 --Jack-A-Roe (talk) 01:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

O'Carroll
The fact that O'Carroll's photographs showed "child[ren] engaging in normal outdoor activity," and yet they were still deemed indecent, is relevant to the interpretation of the definition of indecency and relates the sentence to what precedes it. His status as a pro-paedophile activist and return from Qatar do not seem to be. I don't understand, then, why the former information is being replaced with the latter. --AnotherSolipsist (talk) 03:55, 3 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, the following section notes that use of pedophile forums was deemed irrelevant on appeal, and a conviction was quashed. I don't understand selective reference to pedophile, depending on whether it suits you personally. Also, you keep deleting a cited source--that's really not ok. You may want to keep the information out, but that's not an acceptable reason. O'Carroll was convicted of taking pictures of nude prepubescent children in a developing country, and bringing them into a developed country--I think that's highly relevant, and it's in the cited source. It's misleading to say he was convicted of "children engaging in normal outdoor activity'--really leaves out a lot.-PetraSchelm (talk) 04:10, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't really care if you bloat the sentence with mention of Qatar and pro-paedophile activism, but stop removing the fact that the children were not posed. That's the entire point of having the sentence. --AnotherSolipsist (talk) 04:17, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
 * It may be the entire point of the sentence to you, but I really don't see the point. (What is the point?) Meanwhile, please replace the bbc citation you have repeatedly deleted. Thanks,-PetraSchelm (talk) 04:20, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
 * The point is that "precedents show that nudist images may also be interpreted as indecent." --AnotherSolipsist (talk) 04:23, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Huh. I think the point is that if a bloated first world pedophile exploits prepubescent children in a developing country by taking their pictures for his porn collection that will "be interpreted as indecent." -PetraSchelm (talk) 04:39, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Geocities citations
All these have to go--not RS. We have no way of knowing if they are altered or incomplete; they are not even primary sources, they're just on someone's website. Also, the statement re O'Carroll comes from a lawyer's pleading in his appeal--it's not what he was officially charged with; it's the opinion of his defense attorney. The statement "nudist pictures may also be interpreted as indecent' is similarly so. Again, this is the reason secondary sources are necessary to establish anything like "precedent" or "case law"--you can't make OR assertions about primary sources (especially not ones posted in fragmentary form on geocities).-PetraSchelm (talk) 15:39, 3 May 2008 (UTC)


 * That's correct. I concur the non-reliable primary sources have to be removed.  If someone locates the original court documents on a reliable website, we could consider using them with careful attention to avoid synthesis. --Jack-A-Roe (talk) 16:37, 3 May 2008 (UTC)