Foreign Perspectives

Sounds an easy solution to the pornography issue for sure although it obviously doesn’t solve the abuse angle in this case.

However, there’s a problem with this approach. For one thing it’s a child safety measure yet many parents give their children phones for child safety too and these days most phones come with cameras. Is eliminating the possibility of inappropriate photos more important than knowing that your kids can call you for help? Given the relative rarity of these cases I suspect that being able to call is probably more important.

OK, so let’s just make photos of naked children illegal then. That’s easy, isn’t it? Not really because for one thing you’d need to arrest all the paedeatric doctors as, of course, they have textbooks containing photos of children, some of whom are naked. OK, so we can make an exception for doctors then. Well, I’m currently doing a child development course and next year will be doing one on human biology. Are you going to arrest students for having photos of children? Then there are the parents who drag out the cute photos of their little girl or boy in the bath and I’m sure that most parents have such photos these days. Finally, there’s the relatively new phenomena of sexting to consider. Somehow it doesn’t seem right for it to be illegal to take a photo of yourself, regardless of what age you might be at the time.

How many more exceptions will you need to make?

What we need to remember in all this is that it’s not the photos per se that are the issue. It’s the people who “get off” on seeing inappropriate photos of children and for them the Mothercare catalogue is their equivalent of Playboy.

2 Responses to “In light of the Vanessa George affair, shouldn’t we just ban cameras from schools and make all photos of naked children illegal?”