Legal and Ethical Letter

Monday 24th June 2019

To whom it may concern,

I am writing this letter as I have noticed a few things wrong with your job application, for example, you mention a lot of different things that the candidate will need to manage, however, there is a lot mentioned and it doesn't state if the candidate will be doing all of them at once or if they will build up to doing them all. Furthermore, with contracts such as this one they need to be clear on what the candidate needs to do, when they need to work and how much they will earn, but in your job application it isn't very clear, for example, it says that the salary will be between £15,000 and £35,000 but a candidate will want to be clear on how much they will be getting. Also while dealing with contracts you should also have confidentiality contracts as that helps to keep personal details about the client and vice versa confidential.

The equality act is what makes discrimination on grounds of race, gender or age illegal, this is also why there is an equal opportunities legislation which makes it so employers must aim to recruit fairly. Employers are responsible for the safety and the well-being of their employees, and so are liable for any physical or emotional harm whilst the employee is in their employment. This is why it's not good that you want the candidate to promote a short documentary about rape, as this could be harmful to the candidate if they have a bad history with that kind of thing. Also due to the Health and Safety legislation, the employee can claim compensation if they believe the employer is responsible, however, due to the fact that the candidate isn't employed at that point they won't get any compensation. Furthermore, trade unions exist to protect the right and interests of workers, which, as stated doesn't apply to the candidates that you are looking for as they wouldn't be employed by you yet.

Codes of practice are not part of the law and only exist usually to protect the consumer, it is your responsibility to draw up policies, procedures and codes of practice that are specific to your institution. With the proposed short documentary that you want the candidate to make, it can cause a bad reputation with the people involved in it, as you want to interview people who might be/have been affected, however, this might make people look down on them as they might only know them from the video where they talk about how they were affected by rape. Furthermore, you state that you only want female victims and male offenders, which will put a bad reputation on the males and make it seem like all males are offenders and all females are victims when anyone can be the offender or the victim. Due to media representation, audiences choose to either like a certain person, place, group of people, etc, which is also why people tend to think of males being the offenders and females being the victims, this, however, isn't good as it could cause rumours to spread and false accusations to be made.

The Ofcom Broadcasting Code is made up of 10 main sections, 2 of which is protecting the under-eighteens and harm and offence which you break as you want teenagers to be interviewed and even reenactments of rape, which is obviously breaking the "protecting the under-eighteens" part of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code. Furthermore, you do some harm by asking females to come forward about being affected by the topic, also if a male admits to being an offender then people might try to harm him which also breaks the "harm and offence" part of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code. The Communication Act (2003) and The Broadcasting Act (1990) is the reason Ofcom exists. The Obscene Publications Act 1959 is what lawyers need to check to make sure that factors such as the age range of the audience can affect whether or not the material is deemed obscene. The BBFC is an independent body which classifies films and videos in terms of age suitability, and I think that the short documentary idea that you're proposing would gain an 18 certificate due to the fact that it is meant to show scenes of sexual nature, this also means that its not suitable for high school students who are aged between 11 and 18. Another point I should add is that you want the candidate to make the production but not keep it as their own and that you'd re-compensate them up to the value of £20 for making the video, even though the whole production will probably cost a lot more to make, this breaks the intellectual property law which lets people own their own work that they create.

Yours sincerely,

Chloe Wallace