The UK edition of FHM magazine has been censured by the Press Complaints Commission for both inadvertantly publishing child pornography, and then failing to treat the matter with appropriate seriousness.

The topless mobile phone picture featured in FHM’s April edition had been taken in 2005 when the girl pictured was just 14, and was published without her consent. The PCC said the publication of the photograph “represented a serious intrusion into the girl’s privacy and had had a significant effect on her emotionally and at school”

The Emap publication claimed that it receives a thousand 1,200 photographs every week of women who were either topless or wearing lingerie, a selection of which are used in a citizen-journalism-meets-readers’-wives spread each month, and that it did not make any attempt to verify the age of those pictured.

The PCC ruled that FHM “had clearly not taken any sort of adequate care to establish the provenance of the photograph and whether it was right to publish it” and criticised the magazine for not responding appropriately when the complaint was raised by the child’s parents.