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The Press Council has considered a complaint by Chrissie Swan about an article published by Woman’s Day in print, headed “It’s Mchappy day!”, on 27 March 2017.

The article featured a large photograph of the complainant walking with her three children caught unawares by a photographer and two other smaller photographs. The article began: “These guys must’ve been doing their chores!” and said the complainant treated her children – stating their names and ages – to a lunch date at Mcdonald’s.”

The photograph of the complainant and her children was taken without her consent or knowledge. Children have a reasonable expectation of privacy, although this can be limited in various ways, in particular by what their parents do or cause the children to do.

The complainant (but not her children) is a celebrity with a reduced expectation of privacy. While the complainant had shared information about her children in the media, she made efforts in recent years to reduce their public exposure, particularly in relation to images identifying them. The complainant’s sharing of information about her children in the media did not mean they were consistently “in the public eye”. Nor did the comparatively small number of photos of the children on the complainant’s Instagram account lessen their reasonable expectations of privacy.

The content of the article, except for one small caption, concerned the private life of the complainant and her children. The level and nature of engagement with the media by the complainant and her children did not reduce the children’s reasonable expectation of privacy so as to justify the article’s intrusion on that expectation. Nor was the publication in the public interest so as to justify the level of intrusion. Accordingly, the Council concluded the publication breached General Principle 5.

The Council considered the article was likely to cause substantial distress to the family. In publishing the article with the unauthorised photograph of the children with their pacifiers and a security blanket visiting “Maccas” with the accompanying caption “… caught on camera”, the publication failed to take reasonable steps to avoid causing substantial offence, distress or prejudice. Nor did any public interest justify this. Accordingly, the publication breached General Principle 6.

For the full Adjudication, see: http://www.presscouncil.org.au/ document-search/adj-1718.