Paperback(First Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226648637 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/28/2019 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Uncanny Sexual Child
On May 22, 2008, the infamous conservative Australian journalist Miranda Devine published what was to be a catalytic opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. In it she railed against the sexualization of children in the media. Devine began by announcing the opening that evening of the exhibition of Australian photographer Bill Henson. An internationally acclaimed photographic artist, Henson is well known for his images of adolescents. This particular exhibition, to be held at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, caught the attention of Devine and other critics after the circulation among journalists of invitations for the opening night. These featured a single image from the exhibit of a naked thirteen-year-old girl with budding breasts and hands covering her pudenda. For Devine, the photograph is exemplary of the abhorrent depths of a culture out of control in its sexualization of children: "Such images presenting children in sexual contexts are so commonplace these days they seem almost to have lost the capacity to shock." She left readers in no doubt whom she believes to be responsible for this social calamity:
The effort over many decades by various groups — artists, perverts, academics, libertarians, the media and advertising industries, respectable corporations and the porn industry — to smash taboos of previous generations and define down community standards, has successfully eroded the special protection once afforded childhood.
Devine's article, and the journalistic clamoring of which it was a part, was the catalyst to one of the most infamous and widely debated art scandals to rock the country's history.
The time was ripe for controversy. Widespread concern over the issue of premature child sexualization had been growing steadily in North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. An Australian Senate inquiry into the sexualization of children in the media was due to report its findings the month following the Henson exhibition. Mirroring developments in the United States, the inquiry was commissioned after increasing public and political pressure was being placed on the Australian government to tackle the problem. In this highly sensitive climate — and in just a matter of hours after Devine's article was released — the Henson exhibition and images were being debated on radio talk shows, the views of politicians were being canvassed, journalists and television news crews were in pursuit of the gallery, and complaints were being made to the New South Wales (NSW) state police. Radio broadcasters had been encouraging the public to visit the gallery website to witness for themselves the "shocking" photographs. Abusive phone calls began flooding in. "'You're all pornographers'; 'We know where you are'; 'We're going to burn the gallery down.'" By late afternoon police had been called in to investigate both the fracas enveloping the gallery and the exhibition itself. Upon completing their inspection, the police superintendent requested that the Oxleys, the owners of the gallery, "suspend the exhibition 'to allow inquiries of legality of photos.'" Henson and the Oxleys agreed.
The following day, the media and political heavyweights entered the fray. NSW state Liberal Party leader Barry O'Farrell declared that the "sexualisation of children under the guise of art is totally unacceptable." Hetty Johnston, founder of the Bravehearts foundation for sexually abused children, and one of the most high-profile Australian child-protection advocates, was calling for Henson's arrest. "The police should prosecute and the last time I checked it was a crime to photograph children sexually. ... There is a classification of porn and this falls under it." NSW premier and state Labor Party leader Morris Iemma, who at the time was traveling on government business in China, was quick to prepare a statement for the media. Revealing the depth of the emotional dimensions of the scandal, he unequivocally denounced the images:
As a father of four I find it offensive and disgusting. ... I don't understand why parents would agree to allow their kids to be photographed like this. The cornerstone of any civilised society is the protection of its kids and there can be no justification for some of these images. I'm all for free speech, but never at the expense of a child's safety and innocence.
Then came Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's now legendary "gut reaction." It was a reaction that was to rebound across news syndicates globally. Rudd was appearing on Channel Nine's Today show the morning after the opening had been shut down. He had apparently not yet seen any of the controversial photos. Today's presenter, Karl Stefanovic, displayed in quick slideshow succession five images of the girl identified only as "N," whose nude photograph graced the front cover of the exhibition invitation. Black bars veiled N's nipples and genital area, and below the slideshow was a news subtitle reading "Outrage over Child-Porn Art." Asked about what he thought of the images, Rudd said without hesitation, "I find them absolutely revolting. Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected. I have a very deep view of this. And, you know, for God's sake, let's just allow kids to be kids." Several hours after Rudd's television appearance, about twenty police, armed with a warrant, seized up to twenty-one of the Henson photographs. Alan Sicard of the NSW police announced in a statement to the media that it "is likely that we will proceed to prosecution on the offense of publishing an indecent article under the Crimes Act."
So began what journalist David Marr describes in his book on the case as "the biggest story in the country" that year — a veritable moral, or sex, panic. Literally hundreds and hundreds of reports of the unfolding scandal were to be aired and published in Australia, and around the world, in the weeks and months that followed. What draws us to the Henson story? What makes it so controversial? I suspect that it is not all quite as it seems. Psychoanalytic theorist Tim Dean suggests that a "topic's volatility indicates its proximity to something psychically fundamental, something that gets to the heart of the matter." Yet this is a heart, Dean is suggesting, that is fundamentally shrouded or misrecognized or defended against. The volatility of the Henson scandal was ostensibly about the sexualization and exploitation of childhood innocence and the unsettling emotions such treatment elicits. A great deal has already been said about this dimension of the controversy. This chapter is about what has been much less discussed, even tactically concealed (in the Foucauldian sense), in the way the scandal unfolded. My hypothesis is that what has been veiled, misrecognized, and avoided by the language of fear and anxiety is the question of child sexuality and agency, and this circumvention is as central, if not more so, to the issue's explosiveness as the widely announced accusations of sexualization, exploitation, and loss of innocence. I begin with this recent scandal because I think it has something to teach us about anglophone child sex panics of the last fifty years generally.
Shame and the Child Nude
"It's a tabloid page one of genius," declares Marr —"the heavy-set coppers heading up the stairs; N's fragile face turned away in shame." Marr is here describing the front-page image in the Daily Telegraph newspaper of the police raid of the Henson exhibition. It featured an image of two policemen entering the Rosyln Oxley9 Gallery with the huge bold headline "CHILD PORN 'ART' RAID." At the bottom-right corner of the image, and underneath the exhibition title Bill Henson, is a small superimposed Brady Bunch–like headshot of N from the (bare) shoulders up. Taken from one of the full-body photographs from the exhibition, N is looking downward as much as to intimate that she is witnessing the furor but looking away embarrassed. Evocative of childhood vulnerability, the image of N's self-conscious pose was bound to inflame passions, Marr is suggesting. Inflame it did. Conservative journalist Andrew Bolt excoriated the art world, claiming shame "is dead in the arts." Only shamelessness persists, he said. "Henson should have been made long ago to feel too ashamed to show his face, let alone his pictures." Hetty Johnston was equally enraged. "We are just handing our children on a bloody plate to paedophiles," she spat. "This is a disgrace for this country, absolutely shameful." The distribution of the image on the internet was itself enough, numerous critics argued, to encourage and normalize pedophilia, and thus potentially lead to abuse of children. Celebrity radio announcer Derryn Hinch was among such vocal opposition, and he was outraged that the photos might be "drooled over by paedophiles." Clive Hamilton, former Australia Institute executive director and sponsor of the Corporate Paedophilia and Let Children Be Children reports that helped galvanize the anti-child-sexualization-in-the-media movement, also echoed this fear of pedophilic desire, albeit in a more measured tone. Citing the testimony of criminologist Bill Glaser, Hamilton hit a notion of caution: "That paedophiles not only find stimulation in media images of eroticised children but take them as a justification for their own predatory urges inescapably casts a darkness over the Henson photographs."
Henson responded rather cynically to these concerns about pedophilic titillation: "There'd be someone wanking over a shoe catalogue. There'd be someone wanking over choirboys. ... There will be someone wanking over the Kmart catalogue." In other words, images don't need to have nudity or any apparent sexual context for them to be incorporated into somebody's sexual fantasies. With this comment Henson is well aware of the mobility, pliability, and polymorphousness of sexual desire and fantasy, as well as what James Kincaid has famously described as Western culture's propensity to eroticize representations of childhood innocence. However, inciting the desire of pedophiles was far from the only problem. For one thing, the extent to which the images themselves sexualized this so-called innocence of childhood was at the center of the issue of legality. Police were investigating the possibility of the images breaching child pornography and indecency laws, as Hetty Johnston had been arguing. Under the New South Wales Crimes Act 1900, child pornography at the time was defined as "depictions or descriptions of a child [under the age of sixteen] 'engaged in sexual activity' or 'in a sexual context'" in a manner that would cause offense to reasonable persons.
After their investigations and in spite of Johnston's protestations, the NSW police ultimately decided not to lay charges against Henson or the gallery. This came as a result of advice from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and the national Classification Board. The board concluded that the image in question was "mild and justified by context ... and ... not sexualised to any degree." Regarding the lesser charge of "publishing an indecent article," the DPP also expressed doubts about grounds for prosecution. "In my view," announced the director of the DPP, "mere nudity is not indecent in the legal sense. In the photographs under consideration, there is no quality in the poses, facial expressions, positioning or context that could reasonably be regarded as rendering them indecent." Even some of those who argued the images should be censored (with the exception of Hetty Johnston) were not necessarily willing to claim that an image of an adolescent nude is automatically a sexual one. This was the claim of the DPP:
Mere nudity is not sufficient to create a "sexual context." The context is the subject taken with what surrounds it and interacts with it. There is nothing in the photographs of the girl and her surroundings, in my view, that could be fairly described as providing a sexual context to her image.
Many commentators, Clive Hamilton among them, reiterated this view. "Although not sexual images, they can be seen," wrote Hamilton, "as a commentary on the slow, halting and unsettling metamorphosis of child's body into an adult one." Alison Groggon's letter of support signed by forty-three representatives of the prime minister's Australia 2020 Summit implied much of the same: "Henson's work shows the delicacy of the transition from childhood to adulthood, its troubledness and its beauty." However, it was precisely on this point of depicting the supposedly "unsettling metamorphosis" of the adolescent body that struck such a resounding emotional chord with the public. This was, of course, just what Henson was seeking to capture. Asked why nude young people are a theme in his work, he replied that they are "the most effective vehicle for expressing ideas about humanity and vulnerability and our sense of ourselves living inside our bodies."
Henson's comments only fueled the ire of his opponents, whose claims about child exploitation were themselves based squarely on notions of the vulnerability of children. Even so-called normal adults were apparently at risk of being complicit unwittingly in exploiting and harming vulnerable children merely by viewing the images. "Teenage children are developmentally fragile," argued Steve Biddulph, a psychologist with a high profile in Australian media. "They try on any number of selves, and have to be free to do so, without adult predation on their bodies and minds. What might seem cool and exciting one day to a teenager, they would regard with horror and embarrassment on another day and at another time." Family psychologist Janet Hall pronounced similarly. Nude pictures "provoke judgement and possible humiliation," she said. The standard refrain of anti-Henson and child-protectionist commentary was that the naked models have had their privacy taken from them, and thus also, according to this argument, their innocence. Said NSW opposition leader O'Farrell, "It is definitely not OK for naked children to have their privacy and their childhood stolen in the name of art." Writing for the Newcastle Herald, Joanne McCarthy also raised the issue of privacy. "This debate shouldn't be about art alone but about the rights of children to be children, in private, in the buff sometimes as so many of them choose, doing inappropriate things, but safe and respected." Or to quote Biddulph once more: "Photographing teenage children naked and exposed, while it could be innocent and beautiful in a different kind of world, takes their power away and their privacy away and lets the world in."
Concerns about vulnerability and privacy were less about images of child nudes per se, than about the adult gaze — pedophilic or otherwise — witnessing the exposure of the nude child. A principal worry is that the repeated circulation and public display of the images might come back to bite unsuspecting and unaware children, resulting in future embarrassment, shame, and trauma. The presumption being made is that N is not of sufficient emotional and intellectual capacity yet to appreciate the fact that she has participated in an inappropriate form of social self-revelation that someday she might come to regret. N is assumed to have acted, in other words, as any "innocent" child might, without sufficient adult capacity for shame when it comes to public nudity. Not unlike a child parading with her clothes off on her family's home movies, she has innocently and shamelessly bared all in front of a much more invasive camera — or so the logic of these claims would suggest.
Other commentators, notably pro-Henson, worried that the fracas over whether the images are art or pornography might itself inadvertently shame the nude body of N, and other young bodies by association. Melbourne ethicist Leslie Cannold asked rhetorically: "Can we allow adolescents to feel proud of their bodies and sexuality, or will we — by condemning as pornographic the photographing of such bodies — forever insist on shame?" The piece also concluded with a declaration to N aimed at redirecting the shame implicit in the anti-Henson position: "You are beautiful, darling. Be proud. Years from now you'll be admired. ... Find it in your heart to forgive adults. It is we, not you, who are in the wrong." Journalist for the Herald Sun Andrea Burns reiterated Cannold's view. "There is plenty of time to feel ashamed of the human body in adulthood," Burns stated. "Telling these children that their forms are offensive, dangerous and fodder for pedophiles is the sickness." A number of letters to editors supported this view. Said one reader: "Anyone who has seen Bill Henson's work knows these images are poetic and in no way pornographic. Young people should be proud of their bodies, not ashamed of them." Scores of pro-Henson media pundits seemed to concur with the tenor of these statements, which is evident in vociferous affirmations of the artistic merit and beauty of the photographs and the bodies photographed. As Terry Lane proclaimed in Melbourne's The Age newspaper: "Henson's work is chilly and austere. His pictures have a wintry, misty beauty that is the antithesis of pornography."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Fear of Child Sexuality"
by .
Copyright © 2019 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.