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Barnardos has withdrawn a pamphlet on child abuse after complaints from the family of a boy whose photograph featured on it.
The Porirua family only learned their child's picture was in the abuse campaign material when family and friends alerted them to the pamphlet.
The latest incident follows threats from another family whose daughter was the face of a Barnardos Christmas appeal two years ago which implied she came from a dysfunctional home with not enough to eat.
In that case, Jacqui Montgomery and former partner Lee Haenga were shocked when their daughter, Baylee, who was three at the time, was used as the face of the 2005 Christmas appeal. The message on the appeal envelope was worded as a letter to Santa and Baylee was renamed Mary.
"It said all she wanted for Christmas was her mum and dad to stop fighting," said Montgomery, 33. "That she wanted her brother, Johnny, to come back, and she wanted food to eat and clothes that fit her."
Haenga and Montgomery first learned of the envelope from concerned friends and upset family members. They had not been warned before the appeal that Baylee featured in the campaign.
Montgomery, 33, had signed a photo permission form, believing her daughter's photograph would be used in a Barnardos' calendar, she told the Herald on Sunday. Had she known where her child's picture would end up she would never have agreed.
Barnardos' fundraising manager, Jeff Brown, said the use of Baylee's photograph had changed the way the organisation now illustrated its Christmas appeals.
He said in the latest incident, the family of the boy who featured on the child abuse pamphlet had signed a photo permission form some years previously, but were not told about the new pamphlet.
Barnardos has a policy of deleting photographs from its files after two years, but, in the case of last month's abuse pamphlet, this had not happened. The publication had now been pulled from circulation.
"Regardless of the rights and the wrongs of the situation, when people feel unhappy about something we want to resolve it," Brown said. "I concede... we don't want to upset children or parents, and having done so we feel bad.
"It was a reprint of a brochure which was low circulation, that was done without anybody checking it. In hindsight we shouldn't have done it."
Montgomery and Haenga, 31, said they had endured much embarrassment and stress over the Christmas appeal envelope. "We got really angry because it made out our daughter came from an abused family. How dare they not advise us before they printed it and we find out through friends and family. The whole family, especially the kid's grandmother, were upset when they read what was written," Montgomery said.
They had received an apology from Barnardos but were shocked to find it had again used a child's face in a campaign without the family's knowledge.
Brown said since the Montgomery and Haenga complaint, Barnardos no longer used photographs of children for mass appeals.
