13 September 2016
GroundUp has received a complaint from an organisation we respect about an article we published on Monday 12 September. The article included the name and face of a child. The organisation requested that we blur the face of the child and remove his name and other identifying information in the article.
While we acknowledge that the issue is ethically and perhaps even legally complex, our current position is that we will not redact the identifying information nor blur the photo. We have decided to publish our response because it is likely that more of our readers have pondered whether we did the right thing.
Before publishing the article we discussed the ethics of publishing the child’s name and the photo. We delayed publication in order to be sure we acted ethically. Here are our reasons why we believe it is not unethical to have published the child’s name and photo:
1. We obtained consent from the mother to publish the photo and name of the child. This is important: we believe that, in general, adults should be given the autonomy to decide what is in their interests or the interests of their children. (It is just as arguable that withholding some of the child’s details undermines his mother’s efforts to get the story known and justice done.)
We have previously been criticised by readers for publishing the name and photo of a car guard who helped get car thieves arrested, apparently because it put the man in danger. Our view was that the man had sufficient agency to make that decision for himself. In fact he got a job offer as a consequence of our report. The point is that when people make a decision to be identified in the media, it actually denies their agency to override that decision, and it might not be in their best interests by keeping their information out of the public domain.
2. Our understanding of the provisions in the Criminal Procedure Act with regard to publishing the details of children is that it is intended to protect children as witnesses from being victimised. But in this case the child has already been victimised, and clearly the police, who are the accused here, already know who the child is. In interpreting whether we are on the right side of the Criminal Procedure Act, we believe it is important to understand the intention of this act.
3. There is a legitimate public interest in the accusation of police brutality or negligence. Readers will identify more closely with the seriousness of this event with the identifying details and unblurred photo provided.
4. By the time we published, the photo of the child had been circulated on social media. Such publication on social media without consent of the mother was indeed unethical. But we delayed publication specifically to get permission to publish. By publishing the photo we were not providing any information that wasn’t effectively in the public domain already.