Henson Case Collapses

So Much For That
The NSW Police dropped their case against Bill Henson. While the ins and outs of it are tedious (yet worth considering), the bottom line is that they wouldn't be able to make the charges stick. Which is about the length of the arm of the Law should be.

The Australian had this take in response to the case being dropped.

NSW Law Society president Hugh Macken said the Henson photographs did not offend the Crimes Act because they did not show children in a sexual context.

"There was never any prospect that these photos would fit the definition of child pornography and the decision of the DPP vindicates that position," Mr Macken said. "Nudity is not obscenity."

Gallery owner Roslyn Oxley thanked the many people who had offered support to her gallery and Henson over the past two weeks.

Ms Johnston told The Weekend Australian last night she was one of the three people who issued a complaint to police about Henson's photographs, and she intended to continue her fight against state and federal laws that allowed images of naked underage girls to be taken and circulated as art.

"It's just incomprehensible to us that, as a nation, we don't have laws that protect our children from commercial sexual exploitation," she said. "We all understand artistic protection is important - we get that. But child protection is more important."

Ms Johnston plans to consult legal advisers to examine the legislation and lobby for change.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma thanked police for their investigative work.

"My personal opinion remains clear: these photographs crossed the line and were inappropriate," he said. "I can't understand how a parent could allow a child to be photographed in this way."

It's been a weird week for me as well, in as much as I've had some discussions with people who are on the Anti-Child-Abuse crusade. Obviously this Ms Johnston's a bit of a crusader. If she thinks nudes are 'commercial sexual exploitation' I think she's going to have a tough time convincing the legislative assembly to change laws. In turn, she is suggesting the Censorship Board has no idea what it is doing, when in fact it is her, and the crusaders who are proceeding with insufficient understanding of art.

That is not to say artists are not caring about issues in our society. The prevalence of pedophilia as we've witnessed this week in the news actually does not correlate with art and nude works; and conversely, it's not like these people are going out hard buying up works by Bill Henson. They probably didn't know he existed until this last fortnight.

It's not that artists are saying children do not need protection or that they are not concerned about child abuse. It's just that when you fly in the face of thousands of years of art history and try and classify nudes as 'commercial sexual exploitation', you're going to be told you are dead wrong.

If it were the case that models who posed for Bill Henson's work were coming forward with allegations of abuse, that would be a different thing entirely. The absence of such claims kind of puts the onus on the law to prove *something* of a case out of the pictures alone - and that part of it actually has well-established social norms and conventions. If anything, this is a fight picked by the Anti-Child-Abuse crusaders with the help of wowsers, and does not say any thing about art or artists in Australia. If anything, none of this brouhaha makes our society look *good*. The fact is, there were 70 pedophiles brought in for questioning over an internet ring. People are committing suicide and politicians are goading them to do so. Real-life child-abuse crimes are going down and it's going down in places that have nothing to do with contemporary art. All this paints a pretty lousy picture of who we are as a nation.