This is an odd tale of social media manufactured outrage.

The lurid claims in all the newspapers about child porn, are not matched by the reality. The images in question are not illegal. In fact they have been shown on TV and distributed online, by numerous online news outlets.

These images would not meet the legal test of being category C, unlike the film Cuties, which does fit the legal definition of CP.

The outrage seems to centre on one image, in which no child is present at all. It is a picture of a handbag, on top of a lot of papers. One of the papers is a court ruling from 2008, about the legality of virtual cp in the USA. That, in conjunction with two other images, which were part of the same ad campaign, is what allowed various commentators to infer that there was something illegal going on.

The other two images, were of children holding teddy bears. The teddy bears, NOT the children, were supposedly wearing bondage gear, although I would describe it more as being punk/goth fashion, which is not really fetishistic at all.

On the back of this, a lot of people on social media got very upset. It reminds me of the Chris Morris, Brass Eye special many years ago, which highlighted the media paranoia around these issues. That paranoia ultimately led to the introduction of the SOR, which was copied from what the Americans were doing. The court ruling from America doesn't even apply in this country where virtua images have already been criminalised.