What this case requires is for two organisations to discover the courage of their convictions. The first is the Tate, which should do what the Saatchi gallery did in 2001 when the police tried to bully them into removing Tierney Gearon’s pictures from an exhibition: tell them to put up or shut up, and that they’d be delighted to see them in court. Like most bullies when challenged, the police backed down. The second is the Internet Watch Foundation which, given its habitual attitude to Level One images (those involving ‘erotic posing’), should, on the grounds of consistency, immediately block this image on the Internet – and bravely await the backlash.

Both courses of action would have the merit of flushing the issues raised by this image out into the open, and the first would make it the subject of much-needed legal debate. In particular, the matter of Level One images needs urgently to be reconsidered if, under pressure of police zealotry, we are not to revert to the situation in which parents were prosecuted for taking photos of their children naked in the bath or the swimming pool.

If the police are not challenged on this occasion, this act of censorship will simply go by default. Without any reference to the Director of Public Prosecutions, without any court passing judgement on the matter, and simply on the say so of the police, the barrier of acceptability will have been raised a little higher, and the Brooke Shields case will become a marker in future actions of this kind. This cannot be anything other than highly undesirable.

The article is nearly correct regarding the law. In the magistrates court there is a requirement for an erotic or sexual element (R v Oliver) but that does not apply to juries (R v O’Carrol). Juries are instructed that the threshold is “generally accepted standards of propriety” or words to that effect.

A few days ago I was asked for guidance by one of our members. I had to reply that nobody knows what is legal. You have to guess, what a jury will guess, are “generally accepted standards of decency”. Hence there is a double layer of guesswork. Polling data shows that peoples perception of “generally accepted standards” are radically different from what people actually think so juries are unlikely to draw the line correctly.

It is also unlikely that police, social workers, employers or anyone else will be able to draw the line correctly. They will almost certainly play “safe” and confiscate computers, children, family photo albums and so on. Low level stuff has low priority so it will probably be over a year before they even look at the computer so it will be over a year before any conclusion is reached. Even if found innocent a family, a career and a reputation has been destroyed, there is no prospect of any compensation, and it can even then be a fight to get property returned.

A consortium of all the major child protection charities felt that the law went too far so they wrote to the Lord Chief Justice and they asked for the law to be clarified to require a sexual element. Subsequently, in R v Oliver, a ruling was made. Unfortunately, another court then ruled that it did not apply to juries. We now have the perverse situation that the law is different depending upon which type of court tries the case! If an Appeal Court Judge can’t get it right, what chance has anyone else got?

By the very nature of the crime the public is not allowed to know what it is that has been found to be illegal and it is rare that they are even told. Almost invariably it is decribed as child pornography despite the law making illegal far more than just pornography. If the public was allowed to know what is being done in their name then there would be an outcry.

The Coroners and Justice Bill currently before Parliament is creating new offences in this area. They should take the opportunity to sort out this mess.