The Story of Childhood (10 page)

Next weekend, Lois is the only girl at football practice. She wears a professional strip. She runs with her elbows out to take up more space, but she's still slighter than the smallest of the boys. Nobody will pass to her. Her team loses.

Back at home, she takes her tea in the Manchester United mug that Grace sent her for her birthday. She is righteously indignant at her treatment on the pitch. ‘Loads of people said I was rubbish and they kept shouting at me to run up the pitch when they'd said I was in defence. I couldn't score because they never pass to me. This boy said I was rubbish and then a second later someone passed to him and he was about an inch from the goal and he couldn't score.' She takes a lolly from the bowl of sweets left over from her birthday cake.

Boys are rude about girls who play football because they don't know any better. ‘Arsenal girls team is actually the best
in the world, but all the professionals are men so they think that girls can't play. Girls football is much bigger in America.' She knows that from the film
Bend It Like Beckham
.

This week, she has been looking through her mother's portfolio again. There are some exquisite images of Lois taken in the shower. Wet hair flat against her scalp, a welter of possibilities contained in her slick limbs, she could be boy, girl or amphibian. In one, a droplet of water hangs from her earlobe like an earring. She is naked, obviously, though not shown below the chest. As a viewer, you want to wrap her in a towel and keep her in this charmed moment. You know that she will slip through your fingers, down the drain, and out into the ocean.

Can Lois see a link between these photographs and the ones of Madeleine Schneider that caused so much trouble at the gallery? Lois says she wouldn't like to be in a newspaper with people writing nasty things about her. She worries that Madeleine might have felt ashamed of the photographs afterwards, or ashamed of herself.

‘I'm actually copying this from mum a bit but I think [Betsy's] pictures are a bit cold and in other pictures children are naked but they're really warm loving pictures and I think it's the same [with the ones of me]. But Betsy didn't make Madeleine take her clothes off and it's the same here.'

Lois says she doesn't really think about strangers looking at her photographs. Basically, photographs are fine so long as the person being photographed is fine. How would she feel if her mother had tried a project like that with her? ‘Weird, but she wouldn't have done that,' she says confidently.

Of course, Sue can only insist that she is not taking advantage of her daughter, or their intimacy. ‘She's not a grown-up and she doesn't understand all the implications. So all I
can do is respond to what she feels comfortable with, and hope that I'm looking at things that are worth looking at.'

Not only through design but also through circumstance, Sue takes the pictures that fall outside the parameters of family snaps. ‘When I'm at her birthday party, because I'm organising it, I'm not the person taking pictures. I deliberately started thinking about the pictures that aren't in family albums.'

Photography, Susan Sontag once observed, does queer things to our sense of time. Before the advent of the camera, the vast majority – those who could not afford to commission portraits – had no record of what they looked like as children. ‘To be able to see oneself and one's parents as children is an experience unique to our time. The camera has brought people a new, and essentially pathetic, relation to themselves, to their physical appearance, to aging, to their own mortality.'

But family photographs do not only exist as a faithful record of time passing. Many of the most typical scenes tell fibs. The beaming group around the turkey will be bickering by plum pudding. Picnics don't only happen when the weather is dry. It isn't natural for everyone to be looking in the same direction at the same moment. Family albums keep secrets, and weave staged episodes into a true story. You could buy one at a jumble sale and invent a whole new history for yourself.

Since the camera became affordable to all, photographs have emerged as the dominant record of family life. People describe their favourites snaps as ‘irreplaceable', as though they were memories themselves, rather than images of remembered events. As Roland Barthes argues in his book
Camera Lucida
: ‘Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a
memory … but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.'

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 discussion 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.