THE NAKED TRUTH
Sandra Barwick investigates
a court case involving snaps of nude children
WAS a Lancashire man, charged with and then unsuccessfully prosecuted for taking indecent pictures of children, 'abused' by the police and the legal system?
This is the accusation of an Independent on Sunday columnist, and the impression given by national coverage of the case. The man in question took some pictures of his young children and another child, two aged six and one aged four, in his own back garden, 'with, horror of horrors — no clothes on,' wrote Rhoda Koenig, who felt the man had been 'abused for the past 14 months by the local police'. 'Photos of naked children are not illegal. . .' she said. 'What of any redress for the harm done his family?' For the man was found innocent by a unanimous jury, after two hours' debate.
'I just want to tell other people to think before you take pictures of your own children in future,' said the man in an interview with local press after the event. 'I would not wish what I have endured on anyone. I feel scarred for life. My prime concern is for the children. . . . Only my knowledge that they were taken in all innocence got me through. They were just rolling about and playing. They often used the swimming pool with no clothes on.'
Is any parent safe now to put photo- graphs of little Janet and John naked with their buckets and spades into the local chemist to be developed? Someone at the processing laboratory, seeing the pictures, had handed them to the police for advice. Should chemists be allowed to do this?
What were the• police thinking of in handing such a case to the Crown Prosecu- tion Service? What were they thinking of, in bringing it to court? The case, as presented to the public, raises all these and other questions of public interest.
Not the least of these is, how fairly has the case been presented by Miss Koenig and others? To which the artswer is, not well, because a great deal of the case was not reported. There are several reasons. There was a ban on publication during the case to protect the identities of the chil- dren, which was only lifted when the not guilty verdict was given. As a result hardly a word of the prosecution case was made known; by the time the case could be published, the story was with the innocent man. There is also a factor to which I have referred before. ('Nobody wants to know', 18 July) Newspapers are unwilling to give the public the potentially unpleasant and detailed facts which make up the evidence in this kind of case. As a result the public, and Ms Koenig, are tempted to jump to assumptions which the former, at least, are unable to check.
There is, of course, no question of the man's innocence. The jury, who saw the
CAPITALIST BUSTARD
photographs, clearly accepted the truth of his statement that the pictures in question — there were charges relating to six pictures out of the group of 36 pictures — were taken accidentally, without him realising quite what the scene on the other end of the viewfinder might look like.
If you do not know what the pictures showed it is impossible to arrive at judg- ments on the chemist's decision to show them to the police, the police's decision to refer them to the Crown Prosecution Ser- vice, and the Crown Prosecution Service's decision to prosecute. Those who might find the details upsetting should turn over this page now and remain in ignorance, for I am about to give them from the evidence which emerged in court.
The pictures showed — according to the prosecution — amongst other things, chil- dren exposing their anuses to the camera. The children's genitals were shown in contact with one another. One picture, in which the children were standing next to each other, showed a small boy's penis next to a girl's bottom. 'Look,' said David Dixon, prosecuting, in his closing speech to the jury, 'at the expressions on their faces — do they look like children frolicking? . . . There are no happy, smiling faces.'
In the prosecution's eyes the pictures looked posed. They were found wrong in that. The pictures might have been 'ill- judged' and 'taken in haste' but the man had been trying, as his defence barrister said in his closing speech, to capture the mood of 'kids playing on a particular spring day'.
But it remains the case that these photo- graphs were clearly not, on the evidence given in court, in the general run of happy family snaps of naked children playing in the sand. Such photographs do not raise an eyebrow among those who develop them: they see thousands every summer. Parents may rest easy on that score. However, it is clear from this case that they should exercise their judgment carefully if a child plays up to the camera by performing what, to an adult eye, might be seen as an indecent act. For paedophiles, as opposed to busy parents like the man in this case, do pose children for that type of picture. They have been caught with hundreds of such photographs in carefully annotated collec- tions. Similar pictures appear in magazines of child pornography. If the police are to rescue children who are victims, then it is necessary for developers to refer pictures which cause them concern to the and for the police to bring prosecutions. The question: was the Lancashire man innocent? is very different from the ques- tion: should the case have been brought'? No system is perfect, and there will always be a proportion of innocent defendants in all types of criminal cases who will be put through a great deal of unhappiness before their names are cleared. That is the price society pays for bringing the guilty to justice.
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