In 2007, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead sought advice from the police to find out if a photograph from established U.S. photographer Nan Goldin was child pornography. The photo, Klara and Edda Belly Dancing, is part of an installation depicting Goldin's personal life and is owned by Elton John. It features two young girls, one dancing semi-clothed, the other naked lying on the floor, genitals in full view. The police concluded it was not child pornography. Why have we, like the gallery, come to think child nudity could be pornographic? Is it, as Canadian courts argue, that context matters and if a family photo of a child bathing is found in the stash of a pedophile it is there for a sexual purpose and thus becomes pornographic? But why worry about art shows? Could it be, as these courts suggest, that child pornography distorts the minds and incites pedophiles to sexually abuse children? With this reasoning any representation of the child anywhere becomes suspicious. How did we come to adopt the viewpoint of the pedophile in our attempt to protect children? Are we in the midst of a moral panic?
In Child Pornography and Sexual Grooming: Legal and Societal Responses, Suzanne Ost forcefully and convincingly argues that our concerns to protect children from sexual abuse as expressed through our remarkably intense legal and social responses to the phenomena of child pornography and sexual grooming are exaggerated, misguided, and narrow-minded and might in fact harm children. Drawing on moral panic and availability cascade theories, Ost adopts a social constructionist approach to reveal the symbolic universe that frames and thus limits our understandings of the child, the harms of child pornography, and the threats posed by sexual grooming in legal, social, political, and cultural narratives. Her aim is to encourage a reassessment of those narratives so that our attempts to stop child exploitation lead to meaningful actions, ones that will empower children.
At the heart of the symbolic universe framing the moral panic about child pornography and sexual grooming is a protectionist discourse founded on the idea of child sexual innocence, a discourse that, by defining the child as someone up to 18 years of age, fails to recognize the sexual and autonomy rights of adolescents. Ost shows the recent origins of the idea of child innocence and argues that our current fetishization of innocence not only blinds us to the reality of childhood, but, most unfortunately, increases children's vulnerability to exploitation. Also central to this universe is a moralistic discourse on the question of the harms of child pornography and grooming, a discourse so intent on preventing the potential of future risks to children and on catching offenders that it has come to overlook real victims. For example, the harms of child pornography are not considered mainly on the basis of whether the image of the child depicts actual sexual abuse and was thus taken in an exploitative context, but on the basis of indecency (England), the lascivious nature of the exhibition of the minor's genitals or pubic area (United States), or the sexual purpose of the representation (Canada); the harms even extend to written material and fabricated pseudo-images of children (Canada). As for sexual grooming, the focus on stranger grooming of most laws fails to address the common contexts in which grooming occurs.
The book is organized around a tight and effective chapter structure. After presenting the theoretical tensions of the protectionist and moralistic discourses that frame our responses to child pornography and grooming, Ost examines the research on these phenomena, the English laws to deal with them, the reasons behind the expanding criminalization in this area, the larger implications of the moral panic, and the laws elsewhere, concluding with a reassessment of the question of harms.
If readers are concerned with the way our institutions increasingly commercialize and sexualize the child while vehemently condemning such exploitation by responding with swift, symbolic, and inadequate measures that fail to transform child exploitation, they will enjoy this book and even be patient with the sections that are somewhat legalistic. Those interested in how law, particularly English law, criminalizes child pornography and grooming will find a rich account of legal reasoning in this book. Ost's keen eye for legal developments in this area in Canadian, American, and international jurisdictions adds a significant comparative element to her English study. This book is a timely, rational antidote to the sex panic urging people to remove the naked body of a child from art galleries, photo albums, and the beach.
