Worse Than Victorian Puritanism

Barbara Hewson comes to the defense of the nude photographs of children in the current issue of Art Monthly Australia, claiming that today's attitudes about youth nudity are worse than in Victorian times, marking some sort of new rise in Puritanism.

A blanket ban on photographs of naked children will not stop child abuse, and the notion that merely photographing a naked child or teenager is tantamount to child abuse is difficult to take seriously. The assumption that any photograph of a naked child is pornographic is simply ridiculous. Article 20.2 of the Council of Europe’s recent Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (25 October 2007), for example, gives a much more restrictive definition: ‘The term “child pornography” shall mean any material that visually depicts a child engaging in real or simulated sexual explicit conduct or any depiction of a child’s sexual organs for primarily sexual purposes.’

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