Child porn and the death of innocence Betsy Schneider's display of photographs of her daughter, some of which show the young girl naked at ages 0, 2 and 5, have been removed from the Spitz Gallery, London, at the insistence of the public and the advice of the police. Last nights late night chat on R5ive with Matthew Bannister asked are we destroying the youthful innocence of our children, I would say it is even worse than that, we are destroying our own ideal of the innocence of youth. In a court case in the UK about three years ago, an over zealous one hour photo worker discovered, shock horror, pictures of naked children. The naked toddlers were the children of a minor celebrity, the incident quickly became a media feeding frenzy. Early on in the reporting you could have been forgiven for thinking that the celeb in question was the head of a major pedophile porn network rather than a loving parent reveling in their offsprings first few years. Imagine today,that I had visited an avant garde art gallery. I study images of dead people, killed in accidents, murders or by illness (as in Death, presented at the NMFP a few years ago), that's ok, it's art, of a sort. I study images of naked women, or men, or both, that's ok, Man Ray, Helmut Newton, go on, you can name a dozen. I move on to a photograph of anaked, smiling, five year old, what do I do ? Move on, don't linger, mumble "It's disgusting" to the next people in line, because I'm wracked with guilt and fear. Guilt, hey, I'm enjoying pictures of naked children, there must be something wrong with me. Fear, those people can see me enjoying pictures of naked children, they know there's something wrong with me. My sister's children, my friend's children, they're all at that age when being naked is as natural as being clothed, if they grow up as we did they'll have enough body image issues to deal with as teenagers without teaching them that there is something unnatural with being undressed at their age. Children imprint from us, they learn from us, especially when we are not consciously teaching them. Our obsession, the media obsession with child porn, child murder, pedophile sex rings, it is fuelling our fears, stoking them, transmitting them to our offspring. If you let your eight year old out to play in the park, he is about as likely to be abducted by a pedophile today as he would have been a hundred years ago, but we are all so much more aware of the threat, more than aware, we seem, as a nation, to be frightened, obsessed by the kiddy sex pervert crouching behind a bush in every children's playground. I don't think we can go back, and that is a shame. How long will it be until someone declares that the comedy peeing scene from "3 Men And A Baby" is actually "kiddy golden shower perversion", how long until we can't laugh at our friends naked toddler stumbling around the garden and instead say, "For shame, cover her up." We have allowed the media to stray too far along a road that was paved with good intentions, the end of the road isn't hell though, it's just a place a little less pleasant to live than it once was.