Free The Story of Childhood by Libby Brooks

children, so dangerous. The recent proliferation of accessible child pornography subverts in the most obscene fashion the pleasure that adults derive from looking at children. It need not be a guilty pleasure to enjoy an image of a child. But we are all culpable if, incensoring this one gratification, we conveniently ignore the locus of adult pleasures that genuinely damage children.
    Because here we can see quite clearly how our fears about childhood can divert attention away from genuine threats to children. We have reached a point in public life where the paedophile sets the standard for all of us. And yet, in terms of social policy, we have barely begun to negotiate their existence. For too many, sexual abuse is a reality of childhood. For all our adult looking, we do not see how this might be made otherwise.
    In the spring of 2004, Sue Andrews exhibited a series of photographs of Lois alongside the work of an American photographer called Betsy Schneider at the Spitz Gallery in London. Schneider displayed a series of shots of her five-year-old daughter Madeleine which formed part of a project that she has been working on since the child’s birth. The photographs, taken daily and then arranged into nine-week blocks, show the child full-length and facing the camera, in whatever corner of the family home she’s been caught that week. In almost every frame, Madeleine is completely naked. ‘I wanted to show how the body changes over time,’ Schneider explained later in an interview. ‘I also wanted to record the incidental changes which happen day to day: their cuts and bruises, dirt, drawings on themselves, temporary tattoos and sunburn. With clothes on, the work would have been more about what they wore each day.’
    But we all know about the kind of people who are interested in children’s naked bodies. A minor scandal ensued. On the day of opening, gallery staff expressed concern about the pornographic potential of Schneider’s work. A rumour circulated that a seedy-looking man had been spotted photographing the nude images. The exhibition was immediately closed andadvice sought from the police. It later reopened, but with the offending display removed.
    Schneider, a former assistant to Sally Mann, whose own photographs of her children have in their time prompted controversy, became the subject of an unpleasant tabloid campaign. Back in Arizona, her family were doorstepped. The
Sun
newspaper printed a shot of Madeleine next to an image taken from a child-porn website under the headline: ‘Can you tell the difference?’ A few days later, the same paper claimed that paedophiles had ‘used mobile camera phones to snap full-frontal images of tot Madeleine Schneider’ and uploaded the photographs on to the Internet.
    Elsewhere, reactions were less sledgehammer but no less critical. Schneider was mocked for her naivety. Given the global climate of hyper-concern about child pornography, had she not considered for a moment that some people might find her photographs offensive? What about her child’s privacy? Her defence that she always discussed her work with her – five-year-old – daughter was sneered at.
    Given the furore, it’s fortunate that Sue Andrews doesn’t always take Lois’s advice. She had wanted her mother to include in her contribution to the exhibition a photograph of her standing naked on a beach. In the image that Sue left out, Lois stands nude in the foreground, shading her eyes from the sun, pulling her lips into a grimace the better to show the recent loss of a front tooth. The shot halts just below her belly button. In the middle ground, a number of other figures paddle on the shoreline. They are blurred but clearly naked too. It was taken in Devon, on the day after Lois’s family met to scatter her grandmother’s ashes at St Ives. It was a hot day and, not having thought to bring costumes, the group decided to strip and