The Saatchi Gallery should be congratulated: it is standing up for childhood

Tuesday, 13 March 2001

One jerk of the knee is bad enough, but when you get two - in precisely opposed directions - things can very easily get out of hand. You can see the effect in the debate over the Metropolitan Police warning to the Saatchi Gallery that it faces prosecution unless it removes two photographs by Tierney Gearon of her naked children. On one side, the terror of censorship provokes alarms about hysteria and police over-reaction; on the other, the fear of paedophilia generates an adjectival froth of revulsion.

One jerk of the knee is bad enough, but when you get two - in precisely opposed directions - things can very easily get out of hand. You can see the effect in the debate over the Metropolitan Police warning to the Saatchi Gallery that it faces prosecution unless it removes two photographs by Tierney Gearon of her naked children. On one side, the terror of censorship provokes alarms about hysteria and police over-reaction; on the other, the fear of paedophilia generates an adjectival froth of revulsion.

But, whatever its origins, this is not a synthetic fuss. The pictures are unsettling, as the gallery must have known they would be. It's possible that the artist - a model turned photographer - is as guileless and bemused by the row as she presents herself to be. Even if that is true, it is surely safe to assume that Mr Saatchi and his gallery employees were more sophisticated about the ambiguity of these photographs.

It's hard to believe that no one raised the possibility that they might touch a nerve in a culture that is hypersensitive about the threatened innocence of childhood. Indeed, that's the point of them. Innocence is not a quality that can be measured quantitatively and written alongside the dimensions, date and materials of a work of art - it has to be thought about. These photographs oblige you to do just that.

The important question is a simple one, but one that must be taken seriously. Do the pictures put children at risk? We should start with these two children in particular. Ms Gearon's argument that they were excited and pleased to have their images displayed is a spurious one. We do not, for good reasons, treat young children as legitimate authorities on their own safety and protection.

But it is hard to feel that they've been exposed to anything worse than the familiar embarrassments that parents have always visited on their children. All the pictures were taken by someone they trusted, and not taken furtively but in the presence of other protective adults. They may well be embarrassed in time - but a teenager's prospective embarrassment is no matter for the state. If Ms Gearon is found guilty of taking an indecent photograph of a child then anyone who has ever snapped a picture of their child in the bath is guilty too. Is this the society we want? One hopes not.

Do the pictures, then, represent a hazard for children in general? Some have argued that, by "sending out the wrong signals", they do. Paedophiles will use such respectable exhibitions as a sanction for their own activities; I'm an artist, they will insist, not a pervert. This can't be ruled out - paedophiles will try anything, after all - but if this argument is true, any depiction of a naked child, in whatever medium, might also be found guilty of being an accessory to child abuse. What is to stop a paedophile from using a Botticelli painting or an illustration to The Water-Babies to underpin his claims to purely artistic motivation?

There is another kind of risk that needs to be taken into account - that of creating a culture in which children's bodies can be seen only as a potential crime scene. Ironically, the Saatchi row blows up just as the sociologist Frank Furedi publishes a book arguing that our fearfulness for our children is distorting their lives. He is talking principally about the conditions of benign house-arrest under which many children now grow up, but his arguments are relevant here too.

The Saatchi Gallery is right to resist the steady colonisation of children's bodies by anxiety, fearfulness and paranoia. In so doing, it should be congratulated for its bravery in standing up for the idea of innocence, not condemned for damaging it.