A local paper has been rapped for interviewing a 15-year-old girl without the consent of her parents.

The Press Complaints Commission ruled that although the girl had agreed to be interviewed and photographed by journalists from the Daily Post, this was irrelevant and consent from a parent or guardian was needed.

An article headlined ‘Matthew was my boyfriend. We were both into Marilyn Manson’, was published in the paper on August 3, 2002.

The girl’s mother complained to the PCC that her daughter had been interviewed and photographed without her or her husband’s consent and that material relating to her daughter’s private life had been published, without justification, both in breach of Clause 6 of the Code of Practice, which covers children.

The complaint was upheld.

The Daily Post article was based on an interview with the complainant’s daughter and reported her reaction to the fact that her ex-boyfriend had been found guilty of murdering an elderly woman.

Details of her relationship with the boy were included together with a photograph of the girl.

The complainant said that when reporters approached her after interviewing her daughter – an interview to which she had not consented – she specifically told them not to approach her daughter again. The request was ignored.

The newspaper said that the girl had consented to the interview and the photograph, and contended that the public interest was served by speaking to her without the permission of her parents as her comments shed new light on the character of the murderer.

The commission said that under the terms of the Code – which makes clear that interviews involving the welfare of children under the age of 16 must take place in the presence of or with the consent of parents or guardians – it was irrelevant whether or not the girl herself had consented to the interview. She was under the age of 16 and the subject matter clearly concerned her welfare.

Therefore the only matter for the commission to consider was whether or not the public interest was so exceptional as to over-ride the strict terms of the code. It concluded that it was not and could not understand why the wishes of the girl’s parents had been ignored.

It also said that the fact that the murderer was interested in the music of Marilyn Manson and produced strange paintings did not justify breaching the code and such a regrettable breach should have been resolved at a very early stage.

A further complaint by the girl’s mother – that the article was inaccurate in stating that her daughter had been the murderer’s girlfriend at the time of his arrest, was not upheld.

The Commission said that it did not consider that any alleged inaccuracy concerning the matter was so significant in the context of the article read as a whole as to raise a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

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