‘They Did Not Ask For This Life’

Abstract

For years, there have been relentless pleas by celebrities for their children to be left alone by persistent and frightening paparazzi. Despite two seminal cases heard in UK courts in 2008 and 2014 concerning, respectively, the privacy rights of the children of J.K. Rowling and Paul Weller, a glance at the online pages of UK news outlets reveals that unpixellated photographs of celebrity children remain commonplace. This article will argue that not enough is being done to protect the children of celebrities from press intrusion, and that a child rights-based approach, couched in the best interests of the child, should be adopted, to better regulate the behaviour of the media when it comes to the taking and publishing of photographs of children, even if pixelated in the final publication.