Our moral compass
There’s more to the censor’s office than watching porn
When Erica has a rough day at work, she’ll open the door to her office, step outside, close it behind her, and run as fast as she can. ‘‘Sometimes, if I’m having a hard day with stuff, I’ll literally run up and down the stairwell,’’ says the Wellington office worker.
‘‘If I’m heading up and down the stairs, I’m hitting the endorphins, I’m getting rid of the adrenaline in my body that I need to get rid of.’’
If she’s still feeling icky when she gets home, Erica queues up Dragon’s Den clips on YouTube, sometimes watching so many her broadband ‘‘maxes out’’.
Her workmates Kirsten and Caitlin – Stuff agreed not to use their last names, or show their faces – have similar coping mechanisms.
For Kirsten, something routine like a walk on the beach, does the trick.
‘‘I go and do something normal, talk to friends about normal things like the leak in the garage,’’ she says.
Caitlin goes to the gym, or ‘‘I’ll watch mundane things at night time, like Friends, something I’ve seen a thousand times’’.
Everyone has their own coping mechanisms for bad days, but for Erica – a senior communications adviser, Kirsten – a senior classification adviser, and Caitlin – a classifications adviser, their methods are especially important.
They’re all employees at the Office of Film and Literature Classification in Wellington, the place where explicit movies, violent video games, and hardcore-porn DVDs get reviewed and rated.
Anything that might deserve a restricted rating – that’s one of those red stickers with ‘‘R13’’, ‘‘R16’’ or ‘‘R18’’ on them – gets watched and is given a ratings decision by someone in the 20-strong team.
That’s about half of what they do, with Crown work taking up the rest of their time. That’s the real-life stuff, decisions that need to be made on photos and videos supplied by police, which could lead to criminal charges.
They also deal with high-profile content, situations where censors need to step in and rule on things that may have slipped through the cracks, or are spreading fast and need urgent legislation.
Two recent examples include the furore over a suicide scene in the first season of teen Netflix hit,
13 Reasons Why, and banning all footage from the live-streamed Christchurch mosque attacks that killed 51 people.
Right now, during the Covid-19 lockdown, they’re doing all of this from their homes, making their jobs even more difficult.
‘‘Whatever the content, we ensure others cannot see it. Staff will ensure there is no possibility anyone will enter while viewing [restricted material],’’ while censors work from home, the classifications office said in a statement.
So, a bad day for a censor isn’t sparked by an argument with a colleague, or having to use a messy kitchenette microwave. Their job is to ‘‘protect the public from harm’’, and that means watching the kind of stuff no-one should ever really be exposed to.
But censors are human and the trio say that, sometimes, the content gets to them. ‘‘Everyone has different triggers,’’ says Erica. ‘‘I find war atrocity videos very difficult, clips that maybe Muslim extremists have videotaped of [themselves] shooting people or torturing people
. . . anything to do with kids is very hard for all of us.’’
For Kirsten, it’s any kind of violence involving cruelty. ‘‘That, I don’t like,’’ she says.
For Caitlin, it’s the police cases that can become overwhelming.
‘‘It’s the Crown work that does it to you,’’ Kirsten agrees.
Along with the gnarly stuff, they also get to watch movies and play video games, and call it their job.
However, the trio are quick to point out that there’s a lot of research to undertake, plenty of emails to send, and mountains of paperwork involved, just like any other office job.
When they tell people about their roles, they’re often misunderstood.
‘‘A lot of people are like, ‘You have the best job,’ ’’ says Caitlin. ‘‘I’m like, ‘Do you want me to explain it to you a bit more?’ They think we sit there watching movies in a La-Z-Boy.
‘‘We don’t do that.’’
David Shanks has been chief censor for the past three years, and he’s well aware of the toll watching vast amounts of extreme content can take on his staff.
He sees it too. ‘‘I’ve watched some pretty horrific stuff,’’ he says. ‘‘We try to get the balance right. If we’re looking at something that’s high profile and needing a rapid response, it’s unfair to have one person shouldering that responsibility. We won’t expose people to that material unnecessarily.’’
Some of the office’s recent decisions give an insight into what they’ve been watching lately.
Gory R16 video game Doom Eternal contains ‘‘one of the more detailed gore systems . . . demon flesh gives way to muscle, meat, and bone, blasted away in lurid chunks’’.
The Daniel Radcliffe action film Guns Akimbo contains ‘‘a high extent of strong, and at times cruel, violence’’, while black-and-white movie The
Lighthouse is ‘‘a boutique psychological horror . . . containing violence, cruelty, sexual material’’.
If a censor has had a particularly gruelling day, they’ll get something lighter to watch for the next, Shanks says.
Help is available to anyone who needs it. Watching explicit content ‘‘is a hard aspect to the job’’, he says. ‘‘We pay a lot of attention to support for everyone here in terms of counselling support – and making sure we’ve got rules around exposure.’’
He’s read about social media moderators dealing with extreme content all day – and doesn’t agree with it.
‘‘That’s inhumane, in my view. We’ve got a managed, moderated approach.’’
Despite the challenges, Shanks says his job is