The earlier anime submissions were also less explicit and it's only recently that we're getting stronger material submitted. We make a genre allowance for the fact it is animation, but when the subject matter is sex or sexual violence or sexualised violence, we don't distinguish between animation and live-action. This is because our experience shows that to a youngster, even in their mid-teens, an animated sexual act can be as confusing or as titillating as live action pornographic films. And, frankly, a lot of what we see in the more adult anime is pornography. Sex is simply images of sexual acts.
Sexualised violence is when violence is taking place with a sexual element in the scene.
For instance a naked woman could be in the scene, or one of the victims is naked, but the attack is not of a sexual nature. Sexual violence is when the attack is purely sexual, as in rape, and it's these scenes which are of the most concern to us. A segment we cut from one of the later episodes of Crying Freeman illustrates this point. The sequence begins as a purely pornographic representation of sex as Freeman makes love to a woman while thinking aloud about his next hit and then abruptly shifts to sexualised violence when he inserts the barrel of his gun between the woman's legs with his finger still on the trigger. One of the earliest anime releases was Legend of the Overfiend which has become a legend in its own right.