Whilst PIE was affiliated with it, the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) argued that photographs of undressed children should not be considered "indecent" – and therefore illegal – unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered harm, or an inference to that effect could reasonably be drawn from the images. A document penned on the organisation's behalf by Harriet Harman (later deputy leader of the Labour Party), working as a legal officer at the time, placed the onus of proving harm on prosecutors and warned of the dangers of increasing censorship, although it did also argue that "it is none-the-less justifiable to restrain activities by photographer which involve placing children under the age of 14 (or, arguably, 16) in sexual situations". The issue of PIE's connection to the NCCL was controversial internally, with union affiliates lukewarm. At the spring 1977 NCCL conference, then general secretary Patricia Hewitt said that "public hostility to paedophilia was such that it damaged the cause of gay rights for the gay movement to be associated with it".