Naked fear on display

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The furore over a picture in a gallery is an example of paedophobia run riot. We have lost touch with innocence
Last week a small art gallery in the north of England did a remarkable thing: it called the police and informed on itself. Staff at the Gateshead Baltic Centre were so worried that a photograph of two young girls one naked by the female American artist Nan Goldin might be considered child porn that they phoned the police and had them come and take the questionable picture away.
Publicity hungry art galleries usually phone the press when displaying controversial material like this, not the police. Now Northumbria police are investigating whether the picture one that is part of Elton Johns photographic collection violates the 1978 Protection of Children Act and are taking advice from the Crown Prosecution Service.
The photograph, entitled Klara and Edda Belly Dancing, features two young girls dancing at home not in a provocative way, either but in a kind of lets dress up and fool around way. One has her legs open and is wearing no knickers; her private parts are on full public display.
Is it art? I dont know. Could a paedophile be excited by it? Definitely. But then such people can be excited by looking through a Mothercare catalogue.
Should we get a police opinion on that too?
The interesting thing is that this photograph has been shown in art galleries around the world without controversy. Only in Britain has a gallery been so paranoid that it strikes me as a symptom of what I would called a growing outbreak of paedophobia that is, an irrational and growing panic about the threat posed by paedophiles. It is changing the way we think and act towards children for the worse. How did childhood lose its innocence and society its common sense?
Things were very different when I was a child growing up in the 1960s. It was a time when many young people in the West decided that to break the repressive bonds of bourgeois society and become truly liberated, you had to turn on your mind and take off your clothes preferably in public.
As a child with hippie parents, I was used to seeing parental nakedness in the privacy of our home and yes, Im still haunted by such sights. And there was plenty of nakedness in the public realm too. In parks, at parties and rock festivals there was always some hippie bird with her bouncing breasts and her hippie bloke with his bouncing bits.
Public nudity was all the revolutionary rage in 1968. That was the year John and Yoko appeared completely naked on the cover of their album Two Virgins and the English theatre got its first blast of full-frontal nudity with the hippie musical Hair. That was also the year that 15-year-old Goldin got her first camera.
As a child, I was expected to go nude in public, which was fun. As a young teenager I was expected to go nude in public which was a nightmare. Hippie orthodoxy claimed that by letting children run wild, free and starkers in public they would grow up to be healthy and the happy adults, free from the emotional and sexual hang-ups that had so blighted the 1950s generation.
But by the end of the Sixties things began to change. New fears about the rise of child pornography led to the creation of the 1978 act. This introduced the concept of the indecent photograph of a child to UK law. Indecent then and now means an image of anyone under 18 involved in sexual activity or thats sexually provocative.
The rise of the internet in the 1990s as a tool to distribute images of children, along with a small number of high-profile cases of sexual assault on children, helped create this mood of paedophobia.
We have reached a curious crossroads. We have become more liberal-minded about adult nakedness in public and totally anxious about naked children in public. A whole generation is being brought up with the idea that public nudity is wrong and even dangerous. Weve simply traded in the old pre1960s prudery for a new kind of repres-siveness, based on an exaggerated fear of paedophiles.
Let me explain. This summer I was sitting in the park soaking up the sun, watching my naked three-year-old son playing in the fountain. He was dashing and splashing through great jets of cold water when a man with tattoos on his face pointed and said, Oi, mate, you shouldnt be letting him go around with no clothes on, not around here.
Later that same afternoon a woman next to me turned to her friend and said, Its not right, letting them go around like that! Her friend nodded in agreement and said, No, not these days it aint.
It was then that I noticed that my son was the only child playing in the fountain naked. All the rest were clothed. I dont mean they just had little pants or swimming costumes on; they were practically in kiddie burqas.
I sensed that to those on the benches around the fountain the sight of a small, naked boy laughing and playing in the water wasnt a natural or joyous sight. It was a cause for alarm.
Its not just me being oversensitive. Ive spoken to numerous parents who all say the same thing: naked children arent considered normal. They get disapproving looks. One mum told me she had been told by park attendants to cover her child up or leave. Another dad tells me he regularly gets grunts and glares from other dads. They give you this look that says, What sort of man would let their child go around like that? One anxious father I know has decided its not worth the hassle and now insists his four-year-old son wears pants when in public.
And its not only adults who disapprove of my childs nakedness, but other children as well. When my naked son ran from the fountain to the swings one girl pointed at my son and said, Thats disgusting!
The naked child, once a normal part of public life, has become a public nuisance a source of embarrassment and parental anxiety for one simple reason: paedophilia. Or to be more precise, paedophobia, the fear that someone is secretly taking pictures of our innocent child and then posting them on the internet and using them for perverted sexual gratification.
Consequently, playing naked in the park has joined the list of disapproved activities of our paedophobic times, such as taking photos at the nativity play or talking to a child who isnt yours.
You tell yourself: dont give in to the fear. Statistically speaking, theres very little chance of a perv lurking in your park. But however much I appeal to reason and say dont be silly, theres another internal voice that says: Madeleine McCann, Holly Wells, Jessica Chapman . . . Get real. Such people do exist, these things happen.