Is Child Porn In the Eye of the Beholder?

[More about photography, children, childpornography, pornography, porn; fotografi, barn, pornografi, porr, barnporr, barnpornografi.]

In issue 2011:1 of Fotografisk Tidskrift, the journal of the Swedish Photographer's Association, is a fine essay in Swedish by Jens Liljestrand (Twitter @jensliljestrand) about current attitudes to images of children and the definition of child pornography. Before the piece could be printed with the accompanying photographs, the journal's editor, my friend Jenny Morelli, had to clear its contents with the rights holders, who don't know Swedish. So she asked me to translate it into English. For reasons of space, the journal then printed a shortened version of the text. Jens Liljestrand and Jenny Morelli have kindly given me permission to publish my full translation here on Aard.

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The Sacred Child

By Jens Liljestrand

English translation by Martin Rundkvist

Goa, India, 2009. A shimmering white beach. Clear blue water, a cloudless sky. The rush of waves and a constant din from jet skis. Behind us: rust-coloured sand, skinny cows browsing among trash and dry bushes.

I'm lounging on the sun bed with a mystery novel and keeping half an eye on my three-year-old daughter, who is sitting in pink swimming pants and playing with a bucket and spade. She is blonde, blue-eyed and unbelievably cute. People here stare at her, ensorcelled, love-struck, touching her hair, pointing at her. The other day the restaurant waiter - stoned? - approached and bit her tenderly on her yummy upper arm. And above all, they want to take her picture. In this country headed headlong into the future - the little dirt track back to the hotel that we walked when we arrived a week ago has already been tarred over with asphalt - every Indian seems to have a camera phone. Often they ask me, or more rarely my wife, civilly if they may take a picture. Having been brought up on Swedish school pedagogics, I relay the question to my daughter: "Is it OK for you if they take your picture?" I guess I think it's her decision.

A well-dressed slender Indian man in white pants and shirt wanders past on the beach. He smiles and coos at the playing Swedish child and takes out his cell phone. My sister-in-law is already there, asks my daughter, who says no. The man pays no attention, takes the pictures anyway.

My daughter is clearly stressed and uneasy with the situation, the strange man who stands before her with his phone portraying her, laughing lightly. My sister in law tells him off sharply, "Please! No!". He pays no mind, takes some more pictures.

I run down to the water and confront the man. "You respect my daughter!" I yell repeatedly. He apologises, looks nervous, says something in Hindi that I don't understand and points at hos phone, as if showing that hey, he just took some pictures, what's the harm? He hurries away.

One of the beach guards soon catches up with him and takes the phone, clearly in order to flip through the photo folder. The man, by now visibly sweating and piteous, explains and gesticulates to the grim guard. Apparently there is nothing on the phone to suggest that the man is a sex tourist or pedophile, as he soon gets his phone back and slips off.

I sit back heavily on the sun bed. Conflicting emotions. I feel indignant and aggrieved - dammit, I should have thrown that phone into the sea, would have served that perv right. Uncertain - OK, he shouldn't have done that, but what if he's really just an everyday Indian guy who loves to see European kids on the beach and wanted a lovely holiday souvenir? Is that really such a big deal?

No more strangers take any pictures of my daughter on the trip. I quit offering her to decide. I just say no, categorically. Her image becomes untouchable. Her likeness becomes sacred.

*

I should perhaps begin with the disclaimer we all seem forced to start with when we talk about this issue. To wit: I hate everything about child molestation. I hate pedophiles, child porn, all the dirt and darkness and nauseating shit those awful people do. I have two little daughters and I'm prepared to kill or die to protect them against that kind of evil.

This is not actually an essay on child pornography, at least not if we take that to mean images of children being sexually abused, images that could not exist unless children had been violated, defiled, victimised. But in 2011, in Sweden, that is not the definition of child pornography. Instead there is a boundary zone between images that are OK (legitimate though potentially provocative) and such that are a crime to produce, disseminate and possess. That gray zone raises a number of difficult questions about children, art, society and sexuality. Those questions have rarely been more topical than today, and they touch upon the most personal, forbidden and sacred of issues.

*

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?

Because at the same time: isn't there something erotic about that image? Or what? About the large luminous eyes, about the sullen mouth with its slightly drooping corners? Something like posing, provocative, that we recognise from a thousand sexually explicit or implicit pictures of adult women? Or what? What do you think?

People in art circles rarely condemn a work of art; more commonly one will encounter a "permissive" attitude to the sphere of aesthetics where anything smacking of censorship will be loudly decried. Thus it is interesting to note mystery novelist Mons Kallentoft writing on his blog that the image goes "way, way across the boundary to child porn" and noting with pleasure that this time "the alarm bells" had worked. "It's never ever right to eroticise a child, not even for the most self-aggrandising, priggish artistic purposes", he added. When I reach Kallentoft on the phone he is at first happy to develop his thoughts further.

"The girl in the picture can't choose, she's being watched. There are people on Earth who get turned on by pictures like these, and that constitutes abuse against her no matter how you shake it. Nody has that right."

But as an adult, the girl in that picture has said that she doesn't view it as pornographic?

"It doesn't work that way. That's like saying that with consent, we're allowed to do whatever we like to each other, and we might as well sign contracts permitting others to murder us ... That picture is child porn and exhibiting it to the public is wrong! I mean sure, OK, you can keep it to yourself in your home."

So would the image be acceptable if it sat in somebody's photo album - where pictures of nude kids are pretty common?

Our interview takes a left turn here. Mons Kallentoft is very upset by my question, or by my matter-of-fact and slightly impersonal way of phrasing it. He asks me if I have experienced any sexual abuse against children. Before I can answer, he angrily declares that he isn't willing to intellectualise this issue further and abruptly ends our conversation.

I feel bad about this, like a cynical and superficial asshole. Somebody who is happy to sit in a comfy desk chair under pleasant lighting with a cup of tea and soft music in the background, writing about this issue as if it were all about aesthetics - while in fact we're talking about children's lives being ruined, children being violated and defiled in unimaginable ways. Do we even have the right to a lukewarm analytical attitude regarding an issue were the stakes are so high?

I don't want to use a fellow human being and colleague's emotional reaction as a rhetorical tool or pedagogical example, but Kallentoft's reaction really shows me how fraught, personal and painful this issue can be. And suddenly I also think I have gained a deeper understanding of how devout Christians or Muslims feel about pictures such as Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin's Ecce Homo or Lars Vilks's Mohammed cartoons. It's such a gross violation that it's impossible to speak rationally about it, a violation that can only get worse when some uncomprehending respectless bastard asks why you feel violated.

Suddenly I understand better how difficult it is to get anywhere when it comes to things that touches the depths of our souls. How much really is at stake.

Later that day Kallentoft texts me, explaining in a friendly manner that he thinks there is a need for frank discussion about these issues, but that he is not the right person for it, and wishes me luck with my magazine piece.

*

Uppsala, October 2009. Simon Lundström, since many years a leading Swedish expert on and translator of manga, Japanese comics, comes home and finds the police busy removing computers, comics and DVDs from his house. A no-holds-barred custody battle is having unforeseen consequences. The fact that Lundström has used the incriminating images in his work is irrelevant. In the summer of 2010 he is found guilty of child pornography with reference to certain drawings found on his hard drive. In January 2011 his case is heard by the Royal court of appeal, and he is resentenced.

The case has drawn a lot of attention, and many - including law professor Madeleine Leijonhufvud (Dagens Nyheter 5 August 2010) - has protested a law that makes it a criminal act to draw pictures of fictional children. The Pirate Party got a lot of press before the parliamentary elections of 2010. Things are not improved when people who have actually seen the drawings describe the characters in them as nude, hairless, ageless fantasy beings, several of them being cartoons that are said to have provoked laughter in court. Some of them are apparently amateur drawings of famous Japanese comic characters shown in sexual situations, a bit like if we were to draw nude caricatures of Huey, Dewey and Louie. Most people appear to agree that in this case, the law has been applied in a way that contradicts popular ideas of criminal justice. The fact that Simon Lundström's fine for child pornography was lowered by the appeals court (from $3800 to $900) also suggests that the judicial system is finding the case hard to handle. According to the letter of the law, he is guilty, but the sentence - less than $4000 for child porn!? - is as fictional as the manga fantasies he was charged for.

But in the media buzz around the manga sentence, Attorney General Beatrice Ask (Conservative) says something that takes on a great significance for how I look at the issue. In a television interview she defends the current legislation with the words, "You can't just violate children and childhood without consequences".

Children and childhood. See what she did there? What we are trying to protect against violation is not just the individual, physical, real child, but also the abstract concept of childhood. From that perspective it is logical to go after comics experts and rummage through their computers, or, why not, force galleries to remove Rosie's portrait. Everything that can be seen as demeaning to children must be prohibited, or at least kept out of sight in the public space.

The Attorney General's phrasing invests the child with a metaphysical, almost religious status. The child becomes sacred and every inappropriate image of a child - or of something that looks like a child - is blasphemous.

*

Of everything written during the fairly one-sided manga debate - I wrote a piece myself in Dagens Nyheter 3 August 2010 - the Sunday column for 1 August 2010 by Svenska Dagbladet's editorial writer Sanna Rayman was probably the most eloquent:

"The hysteria around the fight against sexual abuse against children has to come to an end. Because yes, all those ugly things do exist. Malicious people, sick transgressions, coercion and cruelty. All of them exist and we fight them - armed with the law.

But we can't do this at any cost. We can't allow the existence of cruelty to decide how we should view everything that is beautiful. It would mean that in that same instant we would condemn and cast suspicion upon both the human capacity for fantasy and the nascent sexuality of children. And by then, we will already have lost."

You use the word "hysteria". What do you mean by that?

"Firstly it's a fully understandable hysteria, since everybody becomes extremely upset at the thought of sexual abuse against children", says Sanna Rayman. "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."

What sort of reactions did your column meet with?

"I got a lot of e-mail. Some people were really grateful for the stand I had taken, but several others were incredibly upset that I could "take child pornography so lightly". It's as if there's this wall that gets lowered in front of some people's eyes when this issue is discussed. They really, really don't want to touch the question.

In her column, Rayman referred to Soft Core, a much-debated exhibition at the Museum of National Antiquities in 1998 when Stockholm was the EU's Capital of Culture. The exhibition featured monochrome photographs of nude boys by Donald Mader - who is an unapologetic "boy love" activist with a documented erotic interest in underage boys. The museum's director, Jane Cederquist, regretted offering exhibition space to the Capital of Culture organisers who refused to remove the photographs upon her request.

"I didn't want them in my museum. I was led to believe that it was an art exhibition, but this is child porn", Cederquist told Aftonbladet (31 May 1998), and representatives of Ecpat Sweden agreed.

Writes Sanna Rayman, "One guy sat on a chair. Another was shot standing in profile, glancing at the camera. Sure, in some cases their genitals were visible. But porn? Of course, that's how Donald Mader saw them, but any sexual innuendo went over my head. The child porn debate is problematic because it demands that we decide what's sexual and what's not. And a lot of porn, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. Where I see only nudity, somebody else may see all-out pornography."

The Soft Core controversy came to a dramatic end when neo-Nazis visited the museum and destroyed the photographs.

But are you really not perturbed at all by pictures like these?

"No, I think the Soft Core images are fully within the limits of what should be allowed at an art museum. On the other hand, I've flipped through a couple of issues of a gay magazine called Destroyer, with young male models, that made me feel queasy. A lot of the pictures there were taken in Asia and parts of Russia, and there was this whole dimension of colonialism and exploitation of boys in poor countries that I found really offensive. It's really important to me that art is kept free of violence and coercion.

Destroyer was an English-language magazine produced as an art project with ten issues from 2006 to 2010. Berlin-based Swedish magazine publisher Karl Andersson was its publisher. The magazine's explicit focus was "young male beauty", and it mixed intellectual or academic writing with pictures ranging from celebrity portraits over pictures of poor boys in the Third World to art photography. Destroyer's unapologetic erotic interest in underage young men caused an uproar in gay circles, it was condemned by the Swedish Federation for LGBT Rights and could not be sold during the Stockholm Pride festival. Nonetheless, established writers such as Oscar Swartz, Unni Drougge and Daniel Björk contributed columns to the magazine. Karl Andersson later published a book whose Swedish title translates as "Enemy Number One of Gays" about the magazine's history. Interviewed for this book, Unni Drougge explains her participation as follows.

"I very strongly oppose pedophilia. And you can't really be sure if the boys felt exploited. But they didn't look like they did. And since I'm slightly acquainted with Karl and we had been talking, I didn't see Destroyer as a pedo mag. I was rather seeing parallels to Michel Foucault's praise for boy love in ancient Greece. And I kind of feel that those images approach artistic expressions closely. ... You know, it's an aesthetic ideal for a lot of people, a boy on the cusp who has just barely discovered his sexuality and as yet doesn't feel anything but untroubled joy for it. Not a man, not a child. More androgynous."

I repeat these words because they offer samples of what we might call "contextualisation". Drougge points out a number of factors outside the images themselves: philosophical and historical links, links to aesthetic ideals, the assumption that the boys in the images had not been exploited, her personal relationship to the publisher. In this manner material is legitimised that would in other contexts be condemned as child pornography.

Destroyer, again, did meet with massive criticism, but was also seen as a legitimate and acceptable publication, or at least an interesting one, in wide circles within and outside the gay subculture. In October 2010 "Enemy Number One of Gays" was reviewed on two-page spreads in several major Swedish newspapers. I believe that a similar art project in straightdom (with nude pictures of poor girls perhaps in Russia, Thailand and Cambodia) would have been ignored under embarrassed silence. The idea that I would contribute columns to a magazine whose theme was an erotic interest in young girls - another aesthetic ideal with venerable traditions - is absurd. It would be a social disaster and professional suicide. The limits of propriety depend on the intellectual, cultural and artistic codes surrounding an image. It's not just about power relationships between children and adults, but also between men and women, between industrial and impoverished nations, between different systems of norms and values that direct our gaze.

*

The editorial board of Fotografisk tidskrift receives a letter. It's from a lawyer who asks in a concerned tone for some kind of guidelines or ethical code for photographers regarding sexual content. This lawyer is defending a woman whose camera was examined by the police: they found images of an eight-year-old boy that led to the woman being charged with "exposing her child in a sexual and thus criminal manner".

Neither the lawyer nor the young woman - who is the boy's mother - can understand the prosecution. In one image, the boy's father tosses his boy in the air, the bathrobe parting to reveal the little one's willy. In the other image the boy is sitting bare-chested between his parents on a beach. That's it.

Can this really be true? Yes, at least that's what the letter says. Is this just about an over-zealous district attorney? Or somebody who wants a case to establish legal precedent? What's going on?

I have nude images of my girls on digital cameras, phone cameras, computers, memory sticks and external hard drives. My favourite is one where my older daughter is about 18 months, toddling around the lawn at our summer house brandishing a paper flag. Green grass, blue sky, the blue-and-yellow flag, her endlessly beautiful body, her blonde hair - that picture is such a massive dose of Swedish summer that you almost choke. It's just pure joy.

"I'd like to publish this picture with my magazine piece", I tell my wife. "As an experiment, to find out how this private, completely innocuous family snap is received in another context. Whatcha say?"

"No way", she replies, rapidly.

"Why not?"

"Because it's not for us to decide."

"OK. But if I ask N.N. Herself?"

"No no no no. She isn't old enough to bear that responsibility."

"So what you're saying is..." I'm lost in thought. "You're saying that nobody has the right, the moral right, to publish that picture?"

"Yes", says my wife. "It's as simple as that. That is a non-existent right."

*

Karl-Olov Arnstberg is an ethnologist, professor emeritus, and author of several books including one whose Swedish title translates as "Swedish Taboos". There he discusses examples of more or less implicit social norms and patterns that direct our behaviour, including our ideas about children. Arnstberg argues that we treat children as if they were sacred:

"Children do different things than adults do, they wear different clothes, they eat different food, they listen to different music and have different rights ... We do our best to treat children as if they were gods."

As examples, Arnstberg points out that our society does not punish children who commit crimes, that they aren't expected to work to support themselves, that we are not allowed ever to hurt them, that schools are no longer allowed to grade their orderliness and manners, and, of course, the strong sexual taboo. All of this goes without saying in present-day Sweden - but not internationally, and nor historically.

"Children fill other functions in our lives today than they did in the past, Arnstberg explains over the phone. In the old days children were not exalted or deified, rather they were seen as less important people, a kind of unfinished adults. You were expected to feel great love for them but at the same time not to get too attached to them, as many of them died very young.

In this manner our ideas about children have changed in the opposite direction from most other things in society. In the Late Modern West, we have severed a lot of old ties. These days anything can be attacked and commersialised. Religion no longer provides our norms. Gender differentiation has gone, homosexuality is widely accepted and legally speaking on a level with heterosexuality.

We also see an artistic development coloured by modernist thinking, where provocation and transgression is considered important and valuable, as with exhibitions like Ecce Homo or Anna Odell's performance "Unknown female". This is also why many Muslims, upon arriving in the West, become strengthened and radicalised in their religion, as they experience a permissive world where nothing is sacred any more."

Except the child.

"Exactly. When it comes to images of children, we see the opposite development. If somebody displays an image that desecrates children, it is seen as an extreme provocation. Pedophilia wasn't a big issue a century ago, but today it is one of the most shameful crimes on the books. I mean, I have grand-children and I think twice to avoid misunderstandings when they're around me. It's not that I am being questioned, just that there is this ghost of our age, you take care not to end up in situations that might be misconstrued.

Because while the child has become sacred, everything else around us has become sexualised. As observers we have become so conditioned - or brainwashed - to constantly wear sexualised glasses that we see things that weren't there before. We have discovered that it's possible to add "... as the girl said" to any sentence at all. You know the road signs along walking paths where a man leads a little girl by the hand? Today when you see it you immediately think 'Hey, look, a pedophile'. We didn't two or three decades ago."

*

I suddenly come to think of a suspense novel I read as a kid, Jesper och gubbligan, "Jesper and the Gang of Old Men". I only recall the title, so I look it up and find that the author is one Maja-Brita Larson and it was originally published in 1969.

Gang of Old Men is about a boy who is kidnapped by a tall old man and kept locked inside a closet for an entire summer. Jesper is neither beaten nor molested, he's just held in the man's apartment to keep him company. Sex doesn't seem to exist, neither for the old man nor for the boy.

With time Jesper finds out that other youngsters are also imprisoned by old folks in the same building. All are fed and treated well. Though they would all like their freedom back, they nevertheless quite enjoy talking to the seniors. On one occasion the oldsters organise an outing in the archipelago.

After a time Jesper manages to flee the closet and return to his family. The old man and his accomplices are apprehended by the police, but the book still ends on a happy note: Jesper promises to visit his captor in jail.

I must repeat that Gang of Old Men was written for kids. Something has definitely happened since 1969 (years before the Norrmalmstorg bank hostage episode that gave the Stockholm Syndrome its name). Instead of teaching revulsion, the novel encourages its young reader to feel empathy with lonely and vulnerable old people. Granted, the imprisonment of children is seen as wrong here, but as comprehensible in the social context, and above all it has no sexual overtones whatsoever.

Today, 42 years later, in the age of the Fritzl basement, Gang of Old Men is a souvenir of a strangely naïve age when the relationship between children and adults was still innocent and largely mutually respectful. This was the story people wanted to tell and the image they wanted to see. And then I realise something else: I wonder why in particular, of all the kids' books I binged on during the page-turner years of my adolescence, I remember Gang of Old Men so clearly. Was there perhaps something uncomfortable about it? That made me feel there was something very wrong about what I was reading?

*

Katarina Wadstein MacLeod is an art scholar and a critic, writing in Svenska Dagbladet among other venues. In 2006 she defended her PhD thesis about painter Lena Cronqvist's suite of pictures of young girls, made from 1990 to 2001. Wadstein has analysed the difference between our perception of a photograph compared to a painting, when the motif is the same.

"Cronquist's paintings of little girls provoke strong emotional reactions, but not controversy, she explains. There is a clear difference in audience reactions to her work when compared for instance to photographer Sally Mann, who shot her own children in the nude for her suite Immediate Family, where there are many similarities of content."

After a Cronquist retrospective in 2009, writer Natalia Kazmierska (Expressen 8 September 2009) complained that nobody problematised the painter's depiction of little girls:

"She's been completely obsessed with painting Lolitas. Her girl pictures sell for millions of crowns at auction. And her print retrospective at Lars Bohman's gallery simply crawls with nymphettes frolicking in tubs, skipping rope while wearing cute underpants and posing provocatively for swarthy male gorillas. ... Academic theses and pretentious catalog copy keep insisting that her art is about life, death, childhood, existence and motherhood, yes, about pretty much everyhting under the sky - except the one really obvious thing."

"The reason is that painting is created through memory, while we're used to perceiving a photograph as something real", says Wadstein MacLeod. "Therefore Sally Mann's photographs have a completely other expression of reality than Cronquist's paintings. And this despite the fact that in recent years digital image processing has become available to everyone and caused us to lose our faith in the authenticity of photography."

But haven't nude bodies, pleasure and unease always been themes in art?

"Yes, that's what the history of art is like, and those themes are still accepted when it comes to adults. Surrealist painters worshiped and idealised la femme enfant, the "child woman", just as the history of Classical art is full of eroticised depictions of boys.

Generally speaking there have been two main modes in the depiction of children. One is the innocent, the other is the Lolita, where innocence is eroticised. What happens in Lena Cronquist's work - and I see this development in painting in general - is that a third category is introduced between the two traditions, with the little girl as subject. The child is given a full identity and complexity, an identity and a voice of its own.

But when it comes to photographs of children, things have become much more complicated. Today knowledge about sexual abuse and pedophilia has become much more commonplace and the issue is covered by the media in an entirely different way. And images of children are always seen through a cultural screen.

Take Mapplethorp's "Rosie". To the child sitting there in her dress the picture is nothing special. It's us adults, as observers, who have a sexual mindset and an awareness of the problems in this world, who make the image controversial - because it is controversial! It's an example of what I just mentioned, a kind of eroticisation of the innocent child. I find it hard to interpret that image without charting its intertextual links with other works of Mapplethorpe's, that often approach the obscene."

*

The digital revolution has also played a part here. The ability to copy images from one computer to another has in all likelihood influenced the spread of child porn greatly. "Internet pedophile" is one of our age's uglier concepts. The fear that images will be let loose and abused is spreading. Private sex tapes are stolen and published on the net to be downloaded by half of humanity, men publish nude images of their former girlfriends as "revenge". We think twice about what we publish on blogs and Facebook. At my kids' daycare centre the staff is no longer allowed to give parents pictures of the kids or receive professional photographers. For reasons of "integrity" us parents are no longer allowed to take group pictures during the annual St. Lucy pageant.

Giant digital corporations also contribute to censorship. Apple does not allow images of sex or nudity to be downloaded through its App Store. YouTube deletes film clips that are judged too risqué. Facebook intermittently culls its members' photo albums and removes anything deemed too sexual. We continue to move towards a world where an endless supply of on-line porn - for those interested - is balanced by a mainstream public space being scrubbed of anything of a sexual nature. Girls above age three no longer swim topless. In 2010 the Swedish Association for Sex Education and Swedish Educational Broadcasting co-produced an animated instruction film for high school students. It caused great consternation and led to the team being reported to the police for the offence of "leading youth astray". This is an old, old law that is being dusted off. According to the legalese, it covers writing and images with the potential to "coarsen" young people and "cause serious damage to their moral upbringing".

In an interesting Svenska Dagbladet piece (4 January 2011), Carolina Hemlin, editor-in-chief of Ottar, the journal of the Association for Sex Ed, writes that a fear of nudity becomes the norm and spreads from Facebook into sex-ed class in school:

"The most everyday thing anyone can do is to check stuff on their iPhone, on Facebook or YouTube, and if nudity is forbidden there, then what does that do to our ideas about sexuality and the body? A positive attitude to sex is not helped if there can be no non-pornographic nudity.

And what happens if there can be no nude children in the public space that are not child porn? Wouldn't that also eventually influence our way of taking care of our kids when the camera is off? How we touch them, wash them, play with them, sleep at night with them?

*

Recently I read an article where a girl said that she had heard from other children at age six that she has a "cock-sucker mouth". That's the reality our kids live with. Do we really protect them by harassing manga experts and concealing monochrome photographs from the 1970s? By reporting film shorts from the Federation for LGBT Rights? I talk for a while with Katarina MacLeod about life as a parent.

"I take my kids a lot to the beach where we live, and they like to run around there in the nude. Why shouldn't I let them, even if there were a pedophile sitting around on some bench and ogling them? That's just a symbolic violation, like burning a flag.

Is the child sacred?

"I'm more interested in asking, whose sacred childhood are we protecting? Our memories of our own childhood, or the real childhood of our children, right now?"