A charity press ad featuring a woman being suffocated with a plastic bag – designed to expose the horror of “honour” killings – has been cleared by the ad watchdog despite a slew of complaints that it was too distressing to run.
Karma Nirvana, set up in by a survivor of forced marriage and honour based abuse, was initially established as a project to create a support network for women who experienced language and cultural barriers.
Since then it has expanded and developed from a local to regional project to now being a national to international project. Karma Nirvana not only supports women, but has expanded to support men and couples.
The ad, created by Leo Burnett, showed a woman with a transparent plastic bag over her head. Her eyes were closed and her mouth open. Text stated “Shafilea Ahmed was brutally suffocated by her own parents in an ‘honour’ killing. To preserve her memory we have a 3D printer set to create a sculpture of Shafilea in response to your tweets of support using #RememberShafilea”.
The campaign actually launched last year, in Cosmopolitan, and was awarded a silver Design Lion at this year’s Cannes Festival.
However, when it appeared in free daily paper The Metro, six readers contacted the Advertising Standards Authority; all of the complainants challenged whether the image of a woman being suffocated was distressing; while one also challenged whether the ad condoned or encouraged an unsafe practice.
In its defence, Karma Nirvana said that the decision to run the ad had not been taken lightly, although insisted that bosses at The Metro, did not believe the ad was contentious.
In its ruling, the ASA agreed that the text in the ad made it clear the intentions of the charity clear, and said that it was “unlikely to cause unjustifiable distress”, while also rejected the complaints about encouraging unsafe practice.
The ASA added: “Because we understood that the Metro had a predominantly adult readership and we did not consider that the ad had particular appeal to children or presented the activity in a positive light, we concluded that the ad did not condone or encourage an unsafe practice.”
