by Libby Brooks
And it is through this simulacra of memory that we use photography to create an ideal image of family, and of childhood. With film and iPhoto, we shuffle reality and lay down what fits best with who we want to be. Memories are made, not experienced. When we enclose snapshots of our children in Christmas cards we are reinforcing the positive domestic identity that we want the world to see. Implicit in the criticism of photographers like Betsy Schneider whose work pertains to the domestic is a sense of betrayal. In subverting the genre, they are exposing this daily manufacture of memories, revealing the unreality of the reality that families so carefully construct.
The American photographer Sally Mann is probably the most celebrated – and most controversial – of the photographer-parents who have introduced their children to the public gaze. For Mann, the home is not a protected place. It is the private realm that renders us most vulnerable, the potential for violation, injury or death stalking every frame. The presence of an adult offers little protection, indeed the position of the parent seems to be largely one of impotent onlooking.
The nudity in Mann’s work is equivocally sexual. Her daughter Jessie at the age of five is photographed in rouge and lipstick, hips cocked, her chest naked but for a string of pearls. In another image, Jessie is asleep on a sheetless mattress, fully naked this time, legs splayed, with a stain blooming wetly at their join.
The art historian Anne Higonnet believes that Mann’s work has aroused controversy precisely because it deals with aspects of the child’s body that the Romantic idealisation of childhood sought to deny. In her book Pictures of Innocence she argues that Mann’s photographs participate in ‘a widespread revision of childhood which is not at all exclusively about sexuality … One of its principal differences from Romantic childhood is precisely that it refuses to treat the child’s body only in terms of its sexuality, or lack thereof. Childhood now appears to be embodied in many ways.’
But regardless of artistic attempts to expand the definition of what childhood can look like, it seems that society has now reached a point where images of naked children are viewed only through a sexual filter and where, in strict legal terms, one definition of obscenity is youthful nudity. As Higonnet notes, ‘[T]he only reality a camera can record is light bouncing off surfaces. Knowledge supplies the rest. And perhaps the least reliable knowledge of all is sexual.’
Images of naked children have never been more scrupulously monitored. While adult nudity is unsensational these days, barely meriting comment, in the case of children it is the notional paedophile who dictates what we may look at. It is ironic that a genre devised to manifest childhood innocence and to celebrate what adults value most about youth has come to facilitate one of the greatest threats to children. But still, in attempting to combat child pornography, we seem to be looking for it in all the wrong places.
In a case similar to that of Betsy Schneider, police were called to the Saatchi Gallery in 2001 to investigate the work of American artist Tierney Gearon, who had photographed her children naked and wearing masks. The inquiry prompted the intervention of the then Culture Secretary Chris Smith, who warned against the dangers of censorship.
In 1996, the Hayward Gallery in London left the portrait Rosie out of its Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective following advice from the police. Taken in 1976, the photograph shows a three-year-old girl sitting on a bench in a smocked dress. Her knees are bent and, as she looks towards the camera, her skirt is hiked up to expose her naked vulva.
Meanwhile, commercial photographic labs have a new role as unqualified arbiters of the obscenities that may lurk in a roll of family film. Most famously, in 1995, the partner of newsreader Julia Somerville was investigated and acquitted after taking some nude photographs of their child in the bath. Yet paedophiles have been known to find children’s clothing catalogues arousing.
Young children take their clothes off all the time. Rosie has been caught at the only stage in her life when she will feel wholly comfortable with her body. That is what makes the photograph so beautiful. How sad it would be if grown-ups eventually denied themselves the chance to look on that and remember.
Responses to images of children are further confused by the prevailing culture. It has become increasingly hard to tell older women from their juniors in the mainstream media. Fashion models take to the catwalk at thirteen, while famous actresses starve themselves into pre-pubescence. At a moment when the faces and bodies of mature women have never been deemed less desirable, the Western beauty aesthetic is constructed around a paradigm of synthetic grapefruit breasts grafted on to a childlike, hipless frame.
The panicky reactions to pictures of naked children have entirely legitimate roots. In recent years, the abuse of the Internet by child pornographers has accelerated with astonishing speed. A click of the mouse separates every one of us from real-time footage of a father raping his own daughter. It is a phenomenon that demands an elemental shift in the way we consider images of children.
A redefinition of what genuinely constitutes a threat to children is necessary. At present it would seem that surveillance of images of childhood is occurring at the expense of children themselves. Not least there is the danger that, in rendering all images of naked children taboo, we collude with the paedophile who manipulates his victim’s feelings of embarrassment or shame in order to keep abuse secret. Beyond this, as a society we have to acknowledge the full extent of abuse that is ongoing in this country. Children can’t be expected to talk freely about experiences that have alarmed them when adults won’t.
In 1995, the Obscene Publications Unit of Greater Manchester Police seized about a dozen images of child pornography in a year, all in stills or video format, as Professor David Wilson documents in his book Innocence Betrayed. In 1999, the team recovered 41,000 images, almost all in computer format. By the end of 2001 they had stopped counting. The scale is staggering. In 1998, when police broke up the Wonderland Club, a global paedophile network which operated across twelve countries, swapping illicit images and video clips, they discovered that the group’s entry requirement had been 10,000 fresh pornographic images of children.
This escalation has resulted in a number of police investigations into those who access web-based child pornography. But many child-abuse experts and senior police officers argue privately that targeting people at the lower end of the spectrum has in fact served as a distraction. They believe that focusing on the wrong type of offender – those who download images rather than those who produce them – has had no significant impact in terms of child protection.
Given the lack of resources and volume of offenders, it is inevitable that police forces end up concentrating on securing a conviction for possession of child pornography only. It’s easier to prove evidentially, and still merits placement on the Sex Offenders’ Register. But it is an approach that lacks nuance. Should people who look at pornographic images of children be treated in the same way as those who create them? Should these images be scaled somehow, given that not all of them depict acts of abuse? Is there any difference between looking at real images of children being abused and computer-generated ones?
All looking fuels the market, but looking does not always lead to doing. There is a correlation between the use of pornographic images and abuse, but estimates vary wildly – from one in three to three in four. Within the professional community, some have expressed concern about the policing of private fantasies. Others support it wholeheartedly, arguing that viewing images normalises antisocial desires, and that the extremity of material available accelerates progression towards offending.
What we do know, according to the most recent study by the NSPCC, is that between 16 and 20 per cent of all children in the UK experience some form of sexual assault before they reach the age of sixteen. Of those children, three quarters tell no one. It is not an exaggeration to conclude that child abuse is at epidemic levels, most of it going undetected and unconvicted.
Yet, there has never been greater public discussio
n of the paedophile threat. Every generation has its sexual demons, and communities are bound together by what they revile. But the parameters of this discussion are grossly limited. There is no information about how abusers ‘groom’ parents as well as children. There is no debate about prevention rather than punishment. It has been estimated that 90 per cent of paedophiles remain outside the criminal justice system, but still we concentrate on the minority.
The NSPCC statistics suggest that the majority of paedophiles are well integrated into the fabric of society, living among us. It is estimated that 80 per cent of victims know their abuser. People who abuse children are friends, neighbours and parents, who are loved and trusted. The banality of domestic abuse is too uncomfortable for us. Tabloid campaigns like the News of the World’s infamous naming and shaming exercise – following the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne in July 2000 by the known paedophile Roy Whiting – confirm the myth that abuse is carried out by other people, and must be dealt with through exposure and ostracisism. But those working with abusers believe that naming and shaming makes paedophiles more likely to reoffend. It drives abusers underground, thus removing them from police and probation monitoring. Fear of exposure and harassment creates extra pressure which may well hasten a return to offending behaviour. This does not amount to child protection.
Donald Findlater of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation has argued that the sexual abuse of children should be treated like any other public health issue, and that a massive public education campaign is needed to inform all adults of the realities of sexual abuse. Approaches based on prevention and non-custodial as well as custodial treatment are gaining governmental support, but require a corresponding shift in public opinion to be ultimately successful.
Findlater is the former manager of the Wolvercote Clinic, Britain’s only non-custodial residential treatment centre for paedophiles, who were referred there by social services and the civil as well as criminal courts. Despite being hailed as the most effective treatment programme in the country, the clinic was closed down in 2002 after protests in the area it was moving to by local residents concerned about their children’s safety.
Professionals in the field believe that in many cases treatment does work. Research indicates that between a third and half of abusers can be taught to manage their sexual arousal to children. But at present, this is only available via the Sex Offenders’ Treatment Programme (SOTP) in prison and the community sex-offender treatment programmes operated by the probation service. Thus only a minority are helped, nor do they receive the ongoing intervention necessary to reinforce their treatment.
The government has funded a handful of projects supporting the integration of abusers back into the community on release from prison. Modelled on a Canadian scheme called Circles of Support and Accountability, each abuser becomes the core member of a group of six befrienders, who offer daily telephone contact and regular meetings, as long as he or she maintains a covenant not to reoffend. Less than half of the abusers in the Canadian Circles scheme had reoffended two years on from release.
The Lucy Faithfull Foundation has also been involved in another Home Office-supported initiative, Stop It Now! UK and Ireland. As well as providing information about the reality of child sexual abuse to all adults, Stop It Now! operates a freephone helpline for abusers and potential abusers, and their friends and family. Those experiencing inappropriate sexual feelings can speak confidentially to trained counsellors who offer risk management strategies.
Paedophiles are not a homogeneous group. They are more likely to be supporting a family than organising an international porn ring. Shifting the emphasis from getting caught to getting help takes into account the different patterns of abuse that occur and the impact on the child of their abuser being exposed. But normalising discussion of sexual abuse is not the same as normalising the abuse itself.
It is impossible to know whether more or less sexual abuse of children takes place today than in previous ages, but we are certainly more aware of it. According to one apocryphal tale of mass hysteria, this awareness caused a mob to attack a paediatrician’s home because they mistook her job title for an admission of guilt. But it does not encourage parents to picket the high-street fashion chains that sell padded bras and ‘Pop My Cherry’ T-shirts to ten-year-olds.
Perhaps this is not a helpful parallel to draw. Do the legions of ten-year-olds dressing like Britney Spears really encourage potential paedophiles to act upon their fantasies? Would a return to high-necked smocks eradicate child abuse? It’s a dangerous path to tread, akin to that old rape myth that it was women’s responsibility to consider the way they dressed and acted in order not to excite the unpredictable male libido. In fact, research suggests that the majority of paedophiles prefer young-looking, vulnerable-seeming children.
What is more relevant is the question of whether tight tops and miniskirts encourage children to see themselves as sexual beings from an inappropriately early age. Children are eager mimics, but clothes that reveal rump or cleavage speak to highly subjective adult definitions of what is sexually appealing. Of graver concern is whether dressing like this enables those who would exploit children to blur boundaries more easily – in the same way that some paedophiles show pornography to children as part of the ‘grooming’ process. And, on a purely practical level, it’s much harder to climb trees in a tight skirt.
Of course, concern about the sexualisation of childhood is premised on the assumption that children do not have a sexuality of their own, however distinct that might be from the adult version. But children are extraordinarily sensual beings, who flirt and seduce and explore their own and others’ bodies. To acknowledge the presence of these inchoate impulses is not to invite their exploration according to an adult template.
Freud believed that civilisation in the West was accomplished only through a ‘sacrifice of instincts’, in particular the proscription of the sexual life of children. He argued that this denial severely impaired the sexuality of the civilised adult, creating ‘a permanent internal unhappiness, a sense of guilt’
But an understanding of the childhood sex instinct is near impossible when so much is invested in the construction of the child as desirably naive. First, we need to understand why it is that adults need childhood to be innocent, and what they fear will result from the loss of that innocence.
This is the conundrum. Is the antithesis of innocence experience, or is it corruption and guilt, and how are they related? Is adult knowledge inevitably polluting? In his memoir, Boyhood, the novelist J. M. Coetzee identifies the curious roundelay when describing his discomfiting attraction to another young boy: ‘Beauty is innocence; innocence is ignorance; ignorance is ignorance of pleasure; pleasure is guilty; he is guilty.’
Another Saturday, and Lois is in the kitchen, finishing off the card she’s been making for Grace. A box of her mother’s photographs is on the table, and she reads from the text that accompanied one of Sue’s exhibitions: ‘ “These photographs all relate to a period around my mother’s death and shortly afterward. They are particularly about Lois’s feelings towards her grandmother and her first experience of loss.” ’
Lois turns to Sue. ‘It wasn’t my first experience. Actually in a way it was grandad.’
‘But you were only eight months and you didn’t really experience that, did you?’
Lois continues: ‘ “Lois loves her grandmother Enid. She still talks about her often and although her almost daily crying has subsided Lois feels that if her grandmother were still alive her life would be somehow better. All problems would evaporate. Enid has become a figure with mythical qualities and an ability to transform life’s difficulties and make a perfect day. Lois has a portrait of Enid behind her bed, a magic spot by her bedroom door, and frequently has conversations with her grandmother in her head.” ’
Lois doesn’t remember the spot.
‘You said when you touched it you could talk to Granny,’ Sue reminds her.
‘Really?’ S
he wants to know where the spot has gone. It’s been thrown away. Now she sounds bothered. ‘Someone who doesn’t know Granny might try to talk to her!’
One of the photographs shows Lois’s grandmother sitting up in a hospital bed towards the end of her life. She stares non-commitally at the camera. ‘I like that one better even though she looks like she’s really desperate. She looks like she’s trying to smile but deep down inside she feels really scared.’ Another image shows her grandmother’s hands folded across a clinical sheet. ‘That’s the ring that she gave me.’
This is the set of photographs that also charts the fall from the bed. ‘It’s a black eye,’ she says. ‘It’s actually a purple, red, blue, orange, multi-coloured eye. It was the night before my grandmother’s funeral and I was bouncing on the bed and I slipped. I was actually trying to bounce off. It was really unlikely the way I did it. All the ways I’ve hurt my head have been really unlikely.’
Lois also has a scar above her eye, the result of an altercation with the edge of a coffee-table during a game of front-room football with Kester. One image shows her clutching a mug, the evening after the injury was sustained. ‘I remember that night they gave me a cup of tea, and it was quite late. The thing I remember most was thinking, “I get to go to bed without having brushed my teeth, after having drunk a cup of tea!”’ The voice she uses for her younger self’s thought is high up the scale. ‘It was really, really deep. I needed fourteen stitches and then it went yellow above my eye and then my nose went really wide because of all the fluid.’ She squirms. ‘I hated that word because it was like blood. My nose kind of widened and my mum said I looked like a lion.’