A Rational Discussion on "Child Pornography"

This essay by Swede Jens Liljestrand struck me as rational and interesting. Obviously the inspiration was the recent charges against Manga collector Simon Lundström, but Liljestrand goes beyond that to examine other famous cases:

Biddick Hall, north-east England, 1976. This time the three-year-old's name is Rosie Bowdrey. Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is a guest at the wealthy family's garden party, the sun beats down and he takes innumerable pictures. Rosie has been swimming and runs around in the nude; her mother hurriedly gets the child into a dress. She sits down, a little huffily, on a stone bench. Mapplethorpe takes a picture, probably using his new Hasselblad. Then the skirt comes off again.

34 years later this picture is considered the single most controversial work in Mapplethorpe's oeuvre. We're dealing with an artist who, later in life, took pictures of BDSM, of coprophagy, sexually charged images of African American men, pictures of himself with a bull whip up his posterior. But the picture where the genitals of a three-year-old can be made out is worse. Wherever "Rosie" has been shown, it has soon been taken down again, most recently in November 2010 at Bukowski's fine-arts auction house in Stockholm.

It makes no difference that Rosie's mother, Lady Beatrix Nevill, signed a release for the image, stating that she does not find it pornographic and that she wants it to be exhibited. It makes no difference that Rosie Bowdrey herself, now an adult, has said that she is proud of the picture, that she can't see how anyone would find it pornographic, and that she wants it to be exhibited. It makes no difference that nothing suggests that Mapplethorpe, who incidentally was gay, had any sexual interest in little girls.

Who is eroticising the child in the picture? The photographer - or the viewer?

Liljestrand says that he, like most parents, has pictures of his toddlers in his family albums that would get him in trouble if he ever tried to exhibit them. Hasn't something important been lost when we can no longer look at such pictures with innocent eyes? I like this summation from Sanna Rayman, who spoke of the "child porn hysteria":

Firstly it's a fully understandable hysteria, since everybody becomes extremely upset at the thought of sexual abuse against children. But it can all be compared to the 'war on terror'. We always have to consider the consequences of any given measure. Just as we don't want to hand victory to terrorists by creating a repressive society, we don't want to hand victory to pedophiles.

If we always look out for risks we will start to look at things in a different way. Our first thought when we see a nude child is "What would a pedophile see" instead of "What am I seeing?". And then we've already given up part of our own worldview. Something that didn't use to be a problem becomes something inappropriate.

I have a great deal of trouble with criminalizing thoughts, and to me the notion that any naked picture of a child is child abuse is a very dangerous one.