Last week a small art gallery in the north of England did a remarkable thing:
it called the police and informed on itself. Staff at the Gateshead Baltic
Centre were so worried that a photograph of two young girls – one naked – by
the female American artist Nan Goldin might be considered child porn that
they phoned the police and had them come and take the questionable picture
away.
Publicity hungry art galleries usually phone the press when displaying
controversial material like this, not the police. Now Northumbria police are
investigating whether the picture – one that is part of Elton John’s
photographic collection – violates the 1978 Protection of Children Act and
are taking advice from the Crown Prosecution Service.
The photograph, entitled Klara and Edda Belly Dancing, features two young
girls dancing at home – not in a provocative way, either – but in a kind of
let’s dress up and fool around way. One has her legs open and is wearing no
knickers; her private parts are on full public display.
Is it art? I don’t know. Could a paedophile be excited by it? Definitely. But
then such people can be excited by looking through a Mothercare catalogue.
Should we get a police opinion on that too?
The interesting thing is that this photograph has been shown in art galleries
around the world without controversy. Only in Britain has a gallery been so
paranoid that it strikes me as a symptom of what I would called a growing
outbreak of paedophobia – that is, an irrational and growing panic about the
threat posed by paedophiles. It is changing the way we think and act towards
children for the worse. How did childhood lose its innocence and society its
common sense?
Things were very different when I was a child growing up in the 1960s. It was
a time when many young people in the West decided that to break the
repressive bonds of “bourgeois society” and become truly liberated, you had
to turn on your mind and take off your clothes – preferably in public.
As a child with hippie parents, I was used to seeing parental nakedness in the
privacy of our home – and yes, I’m still haunted by such sights. And there
was plenty of nakedness in the public realm too. In parks, at parties and
rock festivals there was always some hippie bird with her bouncing breasts
and her hippie bloke with his bouncing bits.
Public nudity was all the revolutionary rage in 1968. That was the year John
and Yoko appeared completely naked on the cover of their album Two Virgins
and the English theatre got its first blast of full-frontal nudity with the
hippie musical Hair. That was also the year that 15-year-old Goldin got her
first camera.
As a child, I was expected to go nude in public, which was fun. As a young
teenager I was expected to go nude in public – which was a nightmare.
Hippie orthodoxy claimed that by letting children run wild, free and
starkers in public they would grow up to be healthy and the happy adults,
free from the emotional and sexual hang-ups that had so blighted the 1950s
generation.
But by the end of the Sixties things began to change. New fears about the rise
of child pornography led to the creation of the 1978 act. This introduced
the concept of the indecent photograph of a child to UK law. Indecent then –
and now – means an image of anyone under 18 involved in sexual activity or
that’s sexually provocative.
The rise of the internet in the 1990s as a tool to distribute images of
children, along with a small number of high-profile cases of sexual assault
on children, helped create this mood of paedophobia.
We have reached a curious crossroads. We have become more liberal-minded about
adult nakedness in public – and totally anxious about naked children in
public. A whole generation is being brought up with the idea that public
nudity is wrong and even dangerous. We’ve simply traded in the old pre1960s
prudery for a new kind of repres-siveness, based on an exaggerated fear of
paedophiles.
Let me explain. This summer I was sitting in the park soaking up the sun,
watching my naked three-year-old son playing in the fountain. He was dashing
and splashing through great jets of cold water when a man with tattoos on
his face pointed and said, “Oi, mate, you shouldn’t be letting him go around
with no clothes on, not around here.”
Later that same afternoon a woman next to me turned to her friend and said,
“It’s not right, letting them go around like that!” Her friend nodded in
agreement and said, “No, not these days it ain’t.”
It was then that I noticed that my son was the only child playing in the
fountain naked. All the rest were clothed. I don’t mean they just had little
pants or swimming costumes on; they were practically in kiddie burqas.
I sensed that to those on the benches around the fountain the sight of a
small, naked boy laughing and playing in the water wasn’t a natural or
joyous sight. It was a cause for alarm.
It’s not just me being oversensitive. I’ve spoken to numerous parents who all
say the same thing: naked children aren’t considered normal. They get
disapproving looks. One mum told me she had been told by park attendants to
“cover her child up” or leave. Another dad tells me he regularly gets grunts
and glares from other dads. “They give you this look that says, ‘What sort
of man would let their child go around like that?’ ” One anxious father I
know has decided it’s not worth the hassle and now insists his four-year-old
son wears pants when in public.
And it’s not only adults who disapprove of my child’s nakedness, but other
children as well. When my naked son ran from the fountain to the swings one
girl pointed at my son and said, “That’s disgusting!”
The naked child, once a normal part of public life, has become a public
nuisance – a source of embarrassment and parental anxiety for one simple
reason: paedophilia. Or to be more precise, paedophobia, the fear that
someone is secretly taking pictures of our innocent child and then posting
them on the internet and using them for perverted sexual gratification.
Consequently, playing naked in the park has joined the list of disapproved
activities of our paedophobic times, such as taking photos at the nativity
play or talking to a child who isn’t yours.
You tell yourself: don’t give in to the fear. Statistically speaking, there’s
very little chance of a perv lurking in your park. But however much I appeal
to reason and say don’t be silly, there’s another internal voice that says:
Madeleine McCann, Holly Wells, Jessica Chapman . . . Get real. Such people
do exist, these things happen.
And then I began to wonder: do paedophiles really hide in the bushes and snap
naked children? Given the current climate, it would take a brave man, or
woman, to whip out a camera in a park these days. Goldin likes to boast, “If
I want a photo I take it”; she had better be careful in Britain with that
attitude.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre – an internet monitoring
group made up of police officers – tells me images of naked children in
public parks are not the kind of material they are finding anyway.
Our society displays a curious schizophrenia when it comes to the sexuality of
our children. We rush around condemning naked children and their parents
yet, at the same time, it is us who are allowing the increasing
sexualisa-tion of our own children by allowing the sale of padded bras and
sexy knickers to the under10s, and pole-dancing dolls and make-up for kids.
Is it any wonder that the photographs of Nan Goldin press our collective panic
button? If children can regard the nakedness of other children as
“disgusting”, what will they think about their own bodies? Will they come to
regard adult strangers as potential perverts?
I want my son to be able to go wild, run free and enjoy a cold stream of
fountain water on his naked body without worrying about who is or isn’t
watching.
In the end, this is not just about having a relaxed attitude to his own body,
but a relaxed, trusting attitude to the wider world and other adults. I
don’t want him to grow up in the shadow of shame and suspicion.
We need to be able to look at the Goldin photographs, for they reflect and
provoke the very anxieties we have to overcome.
