I bet Olympia Nelson's parents wouldn't place such an importance on 'The Art' if some sick b@stards got their hands on their little girl and she was found raped and killed.
I suspect they wouldn't associate the two; one would not be the cause of the other. Even if her exposure had increased her public profile, her rape and murder would still be a random event of vanishing rarity, and the risk inherent in the original photographs still very tiny.
I certainly would not be happy with my daughter even being asked to pose for such shots.
And that's an entirely reasonable personal point of view.
But how far do we want to go as a society?
A very good question-in fact, that was the question I made this post to ask. I do think that we need to balance Art and Public Sensibility, although not because the public are able to make an accurate risk assessment in the circumstances (they're patently not able to do so, by reason of the way their brains have evolved, such that they're fine-tuned for the realities of living in small, isolated groups of a couple of dozen individuals when any kind of threat that they hear about it actually very likely to be a threat to them personally) but because the public's distress over such things is real, and that needs to be taken into account. Frankly, I'd rather see a change in the way society deals publicly with issues like this as opposed to self-censorship, but the latter may well need to be part of the picture.
I suspect they wouldn't associate the two; one would not be the cause of the other. Even if her exposure had increased her public profile, her rape and murder would still be a random event of vanishing rarity, and the risk inherent in the original photographs still very tiny.
I certainly would not be happy with my daughter even being asked to pose for such shots.
And that's an entirely reasonable personal point of view.
But how far do we want to go as a society?
A very good question-in fact, that was the question I made this post to ask. I do think that we need to balance Art and Public Sensibility, although not because the public are able to make an accurate risk assessment in the circumstances (they're patently not able to do so, by reason of the way their brains have evolved, such that they're fine-tuned for the realities of living in small, isolated groups of a couple of dozen individuals when any kind of threat that they hear about it actually very likely to be a threat to them personally) but because the public's distress over such things is real, and that needs to be taken into account. Frankly, I'd rather see a change in the way society deals publicly with issues like this as opposed to self-censorship, but the latter may well need to be part of the picture.
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