On two occasions recently the Guardian has published pictures of young people which have drawn justified complaints from parents. The point about both was not that the pictures in themselves had anything wrong with them. They were the kind of photographs that, in different circumstances, the parents who complained might have been pleased to see. The objections were prompted largely by the context in which they were used.
The first picture, which appeared in the paper’s Society section last November 28, showed three girls running past a community centre in Oldham. The context was a visit to the centre by the chairman of the Oldham independent review looking into riots in the town and prevailing racial attitudes.
The mother of one girl had already refused permission for her daughter to be interviewed by television in connection with the visit. She was more than a little upset to discover the Guardian picture. She felt that the headline, quoting the words of an Asian youth from a nearby part of Oldham, “If you go into a white area you are only going to get abuse”, suggested that her daughter and her two friends – all 12 years of age, all white, and all readily recognisable – held racist and specifically anti-Asian prejudices, and this, she said, was certainly not the case. No permission was sought before the picture was taken.
I felt that the objections raised and the anxieties that were voiced were reasonable and might have been anticipated and I said that the picture should not have been used.
I feel much the same about the second case. This involved a picture used in a two-page spread in G2 on December 17, in which a staff journalist looked at racial attitudes in Leeds in the context of the attack on an Asian student by a group that included a Leeds United footballer.
Three pictures were used. On the left-hand page there were two small ones in black and white, showing Sarfraz Najeib, the person who was attacked, and Jonathan Woodgate, the Leeds footballer who was found guilty of affray. Almost half the area of the right-hand page was taken up by a colour photograph of an unidentified young Asian in medium close-up looking straight out at the reader. No other face was visible in the picture. The caption read, “In the crowd… a Leeds fan at Elland Road. Supporters are bewildered that their club is once again being associated with racism.”
This picture was taken with a long lens. The photographer did not seek permission and the boy in the picture was unaware that it had been taken. His father – the family are Hindu – who was actually with his son at the match, objected strongly. He felt that the picture had unacceptably raised his son, who was 14 at the time, to uncomfortable prominence in the midst of a controversial situation and in a way that was clearly likely to induce anxieties. He thought this should have been anticipated, particularly, as he put it, by a paper such as the Guardian.
I agree with him. Although the paper was acting with positive intent and the picture was chosen to show that Asians were continuing to enjoy Leeds matches, it was unfair to nominate a single young individual to make this point. At my request the editor asked for the picture to be deleted from our archive.
I thought it would be useful to hear the views of the boy, so with the agreement of his father, I visited him at his home in West Yorkshire. He said he was at school when the paper was pointed out to him by a succession of three teachers, one of whom gave him a pass to go out and get a copy of the paper for himself. His first thought, he said, was “Wow! my picture in the paper.” Then some of his friends, many of whom are Muslims, started taunting him as Leeds United’s “token Asian”. He went through the day feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable, and, by the time he got home that evening to talk to his father about it, he was angry. He stayed away from the next Leeds home match. “I am just someone who likes football and likes watching Leeds. I don’t think of myself as ‘a Leeds United fan’.”
The code of the Press Complaints Commission is not totally helpful. The use of the long lens is not relevant since its restriction applies to private places or public places where there there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. A football queue is not such a place. But the code also says: “Journalists must not interview or photograph children under the age of 16 on subjects involving the welfare of the child… in the absence of or without the consent of a parent [or responsible adult].” The phrase “the welfare of the child” needs clarifying. However the intention is clear enough. In both these cases the paper should have thought a bit more about the burden it was imposing.
